OpenSocial standard for WiserEarth API

[Patrick]

http://www.wiserearth.org/article/7b8548f1433a87584fb80484085a6e92

Hi all,

Firstly, I apologize, but I'm very new to the OpenSocial platform in general, and just trying to figure out whether it makes sense to dive in deeper.

Context:

WiserEarth is a community for social justice and environmental groups (non-profit, business or informal) which aims to help connect them. The site itself is open source and run/developed by a non-profit. The platform has been generalized for others to use, and is available on sourceforge. The site allows users to sign up as "people", but allows every user to create new entities that do not belong to any one person. There are "organizations" which might correspond to "groups" in OpenSocial, but there are also entities like "articles", "solutions", etc. A major concept on WiserEarth is that any user can designate connections between any other two entities (including organizations), and they can also create connections between themselves (as users) and these entities. The relationships are synchronous, and optionally semantic.

Importantly, there are tools that allow these networks of relationships to be visualized.

The website's developers are currently working on an API so that other services may retrieve much of the data from the site. It's currently read-only, but I believe the intention is to make it read-write eventually. I'm curious whether OpenSocial is in any way relevant to what they're working on over there.

Again, apologies if the terminology I'm using is inappropriate in some cases. I frequently read posts like this on the Drupal forums (from very novice users), and I now realize how they must feel! I'm very new to OpenSocial, so please go easy on me :)

Thanks!