OpenDiscovery

The OpenDiscovery project is an open source implementation of various building blocks to enable Distributed Business Service Discovery.

The purpose of OpenDiscovery is to facilitate the creation of a new - initially local but potentially global - ecosystem for exchange of products and services.

This will be accomplished by providing tools enabling vendors to exhibit their services in a way that allows potential consumers to discover them without the need for a common intermediary.

The central OpenDiscovery components are the Resolver and the Business Publisher, while the first "visible" end user component is the Business Investigator browser extension. Repositories for all components are available on Github and are open for collaboration with respect to business issues as well as technical issues.

Key prerequisites for Distributed Service Discovery are:

• an authoritative association between registered business entities and their online services.
• semantic structures that allow vendors to describe their services in standardized ways.
• discovery methods enabling consumers to find and aggregate relevant vendor data.

The benefits of Distributed Service Discovery include:

• Once-only Principle: A business only needs to publish information about its services at one place.
• Big Data Analysis: It becomes much easier for third parties to gather reliable data about business entities.
• Identity Validation: Provides an easier, cheaper, and more flexible alternative to EV-Certificates.
• Privacy & Consent: Consent can be managed in the aggregation and prioritization tools, so consumers will only be forwarded to business entities that comply with their own privacy policies.
• Significant savings: Today, discovery costs (e.g. to GAFA's) typically amounts to 15-30 percent of the traded value. As Distributed Discovery ensures normal competition for vendor as well as consumer tools, this amount can be expected to drop significantly.
• Platform independence: No more need for vendors to register with several intermediaries to expose themselves to every consumer - or for consumers to register with more platforms to avoid the risk of missing attractive offers.

The OpenDiscovery project is supported by
Peercraft ApS