An Introduction to WEMI and the Future of the Online Experience

By Courtney Garcia Feb 16, 2012

Like people, computers often lose a few things in translation, some of the minutiae more significant than others. The growth and interconnectivity of our global community in many ways parallels the spawning of an equally giant network of online communications systems, all attempting to speak with each other and share information, yet without common ground. It seems the web needs a translator, and for the team behind OASIS’s recently announced WEMI (Web Experience Interoperability Initiative) committee, the call to action comes none too soon.

A Gross Need for Web Experience Management

The idea behind WEMI was initially sparked during discussions for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification), another initiative at OASIS to create a standard for diverse document management systems. A few members on the CMIS team realized a similar demand was necessary for web experience. Braced with the task of devising an abstract features set “enabling organizations to optimize and manage online engagement with their users,” WEMI was launched, and thus will aim to establish open standards extending the reach of experiences into social networks and end-user devices.

As Cedric Huesler of Adobe Systems, and Committee chair describes it, in system communications, there’s an author and a publisher. The extent of the author’s role is to manage content. What WEMI strives to do is enhance the final experience presented — the "publisher’s" job — to various interfaces, from mobile phones to tablets to Desktops.

“There are a few challenges I think exist in web experience management,” explains Huesler to CMSWire. “First, customers spend a lot of time putting data into a system. Some systems already have defining structures or a defined content model, but others make it up on the fly. All these systems work differently as soon as they have to expose data for integration into other systems. It is a lot of plumbing work, which the customer has to pay for…Furthermore, another main driver is the fact there are all kinds of other systems, which want to absorb that content. The subject of targeting content is, of course, a big thing in online marketing — you want content relevant to visitors, content based on past visits. Some CMS have that capability built in but there are tons of providers having a hard time accessing and making use of that content.”

Additionally, with more and more websites working to convert material for mobile platforms, another challenge crops up in that some CMS have built in structures to map it out, but others create intermediate layers to transform information mathematically. This creates a complex area of formulas to decode, thus, WEMI will establish a simple semantic way of getting it out most efficiently. Lastly, with interest in social media publishing proliferating, vendors are building their systems incompatible with the next, a third task to be addressed.

Notes Huesler,

There are various ways to find and access content…We are going to create an API that is read-only, which is an important limitation as it’s very easy to be repurposed, it’s reusable, and it’s not remote or out of scope of unlocking all the content over different CMS."

The Process

The WEMI team aims to use existing systems as a starting point, identifying what works and doesn’t, and what still needs to be invented. Detailed plans include “specifying a default binding as a lightweight, resource-oriented, HTTP-based protocol that will focus on ease-of-consumption from modern web browsers (and web browser-like systems) as well as server-side integration technologies.”