In this paper we will discuss the proposal of creating an information sharing pipeline [real-time information channel] where all stakeholders would engage in exchange/verification of information about entities. Entities affected by this discussion include personal and organizational names and or identifiers as well as subject headings from different controlled vocabularies. This decentralized system could potentially join together various software instances so that everyone would be able to see the activities in all the hubs. Identified stakeholders include individuals, libraries, vendors, publishers, identity providers, OCLC. The proposed solution is a shared information pipeline where these stakeholders/agents will be able to share and exchange data about entities that would enable real time data exchange. Two W3C recommended protocols are considered as potential solution: the WebSub protocol and the ActivityPub protocol. We will compare and explore the two protocols for the purpose of identifying the best way to create an information sharing pipeline that will enable all stakeholders to have access to most up to date information. According to the document on the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) site, “WebSub provides a common mechanism for communication between publishers of any kind of Web content and their subscribers, based on HTTP web hooks. Subscription requests are relayed through hubs, which validate and verify the request. Hubs then distribute new and updated content to subscribers when it becomes available.” ActivityPub “is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [ActivityStreams] 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.
