A year and a half ago when we, after a lot of prototyping, finally got close to stabilizing the key principles of the Open Data Fabric protocol, me and Nilay decided to write a formal specification and a whitepaper on it. While we quickly released the specification to the public and continue to improve it since, the whitepaper did not see the light of day until now.
Many technology companies (e.g. Ethereum) started their journey with whitepapers - it’s a great way to share your ideas and get feedback from the experts in the field, assuming you can get them to read it.
To get the expert attention we decided to submit the whitepaper to a few major data conferences … and got rejected.
See, a crucial part of any research is the results. Without results, all ideas are just speculation. We understood well at the time that all we had was an idea and a prototype that reviewers will not even look at. The ambitiousness of the idea also meant that it will take a lot of time and effort until it can be practically applied in a real world project. The good news was that we got the expert attention we needed and otherwise the whitepaper was sound.
While we’re still working hard on building the collaborations needed to bring ODF to life, we decided to publish the whitepaper in its original form, as it presents a very neat and condensed introductory material. It accurately describes the problems we’re solving and the vision we’re working towards.
You can find it on arxiv.org and on this website.
Let us know what you think!
