Synchrona — data synchronization between different internet services

Abstract

Synchrona research project is aimed at synchronizing data between multiple different Internet sites and services. It tries to address some of the issues related to data synchronization between varieties of social Internet services. In this paper we present an open source implementation of an extensible data synchronization platform for this purpose. In this paper Synchrona service is presented with some of the major applications built within for the service. Here we have described synchronization services for the following sites; Blogger, Facebook, Moodle and Twitter. However the service is made extensible via an API so that new synchronization engines can be included for other Internet sites and services. This project is user centric and will provide the average Internet user with the freedom to choose the manner in which they want their data synchronized by stating their preferences in a web browser plug-in. The browser plug-in will act as the user front end and pass user updates to the web service for synchronization. The system also includes real-time data synchronization between the users’ friends in the form of notifications. Synchrona, in its implementation will focus mainly on the aspect of fuzzy data synchronization to ensure that user data is synchronized seamlessly between multiple sites without loss of meaning.