Data Transfer Project wants to make switching platforms easy

The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 and was initially designed to create a data transfer protocol that would make data more portable across the web. Recently the organization has released a new white paper named, Data Transfer Project Overview and Fundamentals, on how readers can build a platform that lets individuals port data between app services. The open source service will use existing APIs to access data, then recreate it in a new common format API.

In the white paper, the organization writes:

“The Data Transfer Project is an open source initiative to encourage participation of as many providers as possible. The DTP will enhance the data portability ecosystem by reducing the infrastructure burden on both providers and users, which should, in turn, increase the number of services offering portability. The protocols and methodology of the DTP enable direct, service-to-service data transfer with streamlined engineering work.”

In addition to the white paper, the DTP provides technical information on how the service will work through the documentation on its website, plus a chance to try the system out using Docker or code. In the future, there will be sites with the DTP API to test.

Data Transfer Project use cases include:

• A user discovers a new photo printing service offering beautiful and innovative photo book formats, but their photos are stored in their social media account. With the Data Transfer Project, they could visit a website or app offered by the photo printing service and initiate a transfer directly from their social media platform to the photo book service.
   
• A user doesn’t agree with the privacy policy of their music service. They want to stop using it immediately but don’t want to lose the playlists they have created. Using this open-source software, they could use the export functionality of the original provider to save a copy of their playlists to the cloud. This enables them to import the playlists to a new provider, or multiple providers, once they decide on a new service.
   
• A company is getting requests from customers who would like to import data from a legacy provider that is going out of business. The legacy provider has limited options for letting customers move their data. The company writes an Adapter for the legacy provider’s Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that permits users to transfer data to the company’s service, also benefiting other providers that handle the same data type.