At this stage, when public release of first XdbE website and after this XdbE software already seems to be not so far away it is about the time to formulate some basic governing principles under which the system is supposed to operate. Sooner or later a certain legal base should be established for XdbE to function and it is quite timely to discuss the ruling principles now.
Participation Open for All
It is the most important principle derived from the fact that data constituting User Circle AKA Social Graph are in Public Domain and not only the very body of data but also access to this data should remain open and public. XdbE provides this via means of XdbE DS Network which is the backbone of the whole system. The importance of the data itself calls for measures to ensure data quality and consistency. Hence, when participation in XdbE DS Network remaining Open in principle it should nevertheless carry some obligations aimed at providing quality service and ensuring fairness of participation. First of all it concerns service quality provided by hardware requirements. The condition of becoming a DS Operator should include an obligation to provide sufficient hardware and bandwidth resources to the network to ensure its normal functioning. Failure to comply with system requirements may lead to temporary or permanent exclusion of such a server from XdbE Network.
Sharing
To ensure fairness in sharing not only of system resources but the content as well the participation of Online Communities should be qualified too. It is not unimaginable that some Online Communities might wish to access the data and run their own XdbE DS without actually releasing their own data into the system. In theory this is possible by setting up a local XdbE DS that provides data to such a community by the way of passing it for an independently run DS. This obviously contradicts the principle of sharing and fairness too. In order to prevent this from happening this situation shall be clarified in advance in the following way: each DS found to be a part of a non-participating network shall be permanently excluded from the XdbE Network.
Open Data Access
Although the default way of getting structured access to the data set is XdbE DS there is also an option of requesting data by clients which are not members of XdbE Network. The system is designed specifically to provide load-balancing and reliability required for servicing such requests. However, one should not rule out the possibility that at some stages of XdbE development the demand may exceed available system resources. This inevitably leads to one sort of limitation of client requests or another. It could be done either by limiting the number of client calls served for one single IP or via issuing developer keys. Needless to mention, that such limitations should be lifted as soon as system resources allow doing so.
This basic outline provides a good starting point to begin developing the future XdbE Terms Of Service which shall be in place before the service becomes operational.