Device Atlas, dotMobis new Device Database, is finally out of Beta and ready for developers to use. I’ve got to say I do have a personal interest in this announcement as Volantis (the company I work for) is a partner in the project. We’ll be contributing information from our own Device Database of over 5000 devices to DeviceAtlas and since I lead the Device Team I’ll be directly involved in that process.

So what is it all about? Headed up by Andrea Trasatti, of WURFL fame, Device Atlas is aiming to be “the world’s most comprehensive database of mobile device information” as well as the most accurate. Those certainly are huge aspirations and it’s too early to tell how close Device Atlas will get to what some call the holy grail of the Mobile Web; a perfect Device Database.

However they have gotten off to a pretty good start. Their first step seems to be to try and absorb as much Device information from current sources as possible. They have already absorbed data from WURFL, UAProfiles and various Developer resources that are readily available on the web and at launch can already boast partnerships with Volantis, Nokia, Vodafone, betavine and TIM, all of whom will be a great source of data. Their other partners include popular mobile websites from whom, I assume, they will be pulling access logs from and/or will be using as beta testers. The access logs would be particularly useful as they would contain device information such as User-Agents and UAProfile locations.

Once this information has been absorbed into Device Atlas the next step looks to be validation. If you browse through some device data on Device Atlas you will notice some data is highlighted yellow and has a ‘C’ next to it. This indicates that there is a conflict in data from different sources for this value and such items need to be validated to see which source is correct (You can see the source for each piece of data by clicking on it). This is done using a weighting system which is controlled by dotMobi. For example if more sources lean towards a particular value, this will be selected and the source for the incorrect value will lose some of it’s weighting.

Apart from these obvious areas that need validation, Device Atlas will also need to have it’s data tested against as many real devices as possible and for this they are looking to the developer community. dotMobi are putting together a test-suite for community members to use to test devices. This test suite will be able to push results directly to the Device Atlas team for verification against current data. I assume there will be a similar weighting system applied to data submitted in this fashion with known community members getting a higher confidence vote than new-comers or anonymous sources.

Device Atlas is not just a database though, it also contains a set of APIs for you to make use of the all that data. At launch dotMobi have shipped APIs for use with PHP, .NET and JAVA environments and plan to add support for RUBY and PYTHON environments in future releases. You shouldn’t be limited to these APIs however as you could theoretically “plug-in” the Device Atlas database into any API you wish to use, though whether this works in practice remains to be seen.

Initially my main reservation about Device Atlas is that dotMobi are going to be charging for it. This shouldn’t be surprising of course as dotMobi are a company and not a charity. However I do find it hard to see how dotMobi would be able to get Device Atlas into a state that would improve on current Device Database offerings if they are bankrolling the whole project themselves. Validating so much data and absorbing even more in through various sources on a regular basis is a huge undertaking.

It’s great to see that the prices they are charging are very reasonable and are only there to cover their costs, not to pull in a profit. Their pricing models start from $99/year to $299/year with all development use being free of charge. However even this simple pricing model has already led to some criticism from developers, especially WURFL users. The main source of contention seems to be that dotMobi are absorbing information from WURFL but will not be contributing changes back into the main WURFL file. They will then be charging for access to this information which, even with lots of other sources and updates, will still have a lot of the WURFL core data. I’m confident that as Device Atlas improves its data and more developers take advantage of the free access, this initial criticism will die down.

So there it is, a brand new Device Database with great aspirations. While you might find the current data in Device Atlas quite minimal there are big plans to expand this as quickly as possible. It will definitely be a while till the data is in a state to challenge current offerings but the intentions are there and if dotMobi can pull it off we’ll have a major player in Device Atlas. The effort will certainly rely a lot on developers and community members so get yourself involved if you are interested. You can hit the main website to have a closer look and you can jump onto the forums to discuss ways of improving the database and help guide the progress of the project.