The recent MIT $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition included a new category this year: The Linked Data Prize. That $10,000 award was shared by three entrants, Convexic, whose algorithm matches job applicants with positions; Link Cycle, which has a collaborative online tool for improving environmental life-cycle analyses; and Upkast, which has created a virtual file sharing system.

Upkast, which was founded by MIT student David Jia, also took the lead in the category track for web/IT. The online platform, which is used by MIT’s own Media Lab, was inspired by Jia’s own experiences having to upload and download the same data across various services – Facebook, Google Docs, and so on. “That didn’t seem to make sense,” Jia says. Upkast takes care of that by making any sort of file system or data service into a standardized virtual file system, aggregating all users’ different web services and points of data under one roof.

Say, for instance, that a user has a photo album in Flickr and wants to move that to Facebook. In this system, Jia explains, since everything lives under the same file system, doing so is a matter of a drag-and-drop operation between folders. All that’s required to get started is choosing the services the user wants to connect with and then authenticating Upkast to them (for instance, via Facebook Connect), to enable the services to become folders on the online desktop. It’s all web-based so users don’t have to download anything onto their systems.

Upkast has done the initial integrations for popular services but the plan is to enable additional services providers to themselves write a simple interface layer to integrate with Upkast directly.

New Take on Linked Data

Jia says to think of this application as a new take on Linked Data. It would be great if different web services would adopt Linked Data standards and deliver APIs that all reside in the same format, but “Web services like Facebook and others are not going to integrate these things very quickly,” says Jia. “So, essentially think of what we do as trying to centralize that, aggregate that all into a single hub,” as a centralized server for all different web app data APIs, with the idea of speeding things along. Upkast is able to present data on the back end in structures including RDF or JASON, or any structure it wants. But what matters most, Jia says, “is the ultimate behavior of the data, which is that you can link it, and see it all under the same roof, rather than the technical aspects of this.”

Obviously there’s a consumer play for the beta service – and in fact an iPad app is now available for these users  – but Jia is targeting enterprise use as the primary initial case. “I think of Linked Data not necessarily as just stuff on the web,” he says, but extending from public cloud services like Facebook to private cloud services like FTP servers and Intranets to personal clouds, like the data on laptops. “These three points of data sources are very crucial in people’s lives these days. So for the enterprise we connect the private cloud as well,” he says. The intent is to provide a hierarchical overview of where all the enterprise data is and manage it under single interface like a file system.

The enterprise space also provides a good forum for product feedback, including helping Jia discover accidental use cases for the technology. At the MIT Media Lab, for instance, Upkast has been able to ease one of the frustrations that accompany using Windows File Share. “We give them a cross-platform and compatible way of accessing their file sources,” he says, solving issues that arise because different clients have different ways of accessing Windows File share. That leads to situations where any update might break something.

Jia has been working on the product since 2008, with fellow MBA student Kelvin Sun teaming up with him on it in late 2009. Winning the prize – with Tim Berners-Lee as one of the judges – was an exciting moment for him, he says, and Upkast’s share of the winnings will go to further developing the product. “That’s what I’m passionate about,” he says.

Jia says he was happy to share the Linked Data prize with the other two winners. “What’s cool about Linked Data is that you can tie it into many different industries, and that’s why they decided to have it span different tracks – not just web and IT,” he says. “So some of the other tracks were able to figure out interesting ways to integrate Linked Data, and I think that’s exciting as well.”

 

 

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