Federated Meta Data for next Generation Web Services

Background
TN20 is a San Francisco and Stockholm based start-up company in the area internet collaborative community services. TN20 has launched a new service called GroupSwim (www.groupswim.com) for professional and social organizations.

Area of Interest, Questions and Hypothesis
GroupSwim allows users to find information from a variety of communities that matches an interest or a topic. The information is presented orthogonal to the communities themselves. Around the basic group and community data, GroupSwim has a meta data layer with information for guiding and enabling advanced types of search.

The basic questions that this project seek answers to are: How do we best build scaleable data stores using databases, utility computing and other resources? How do we deliver and share meta data so that GroupSwim build the best possible meta data around its core data?

This thesis project concerns the design and prototyping of a meta data layer using various resources on the internet making it possible to deliver existing meta data and also to share relevant data from GroupSwim.

Objectives
The objective is to:
1. Review and refine the GroupSwim meta datalayer.
2. Map and integrate meta data retrieval to an external service (which we have selected).
3. Implement a prototype for federated meta data.
4. Evaluate this method of gathering and sharing meta data and proposing a strategy for incorporating it in the product.