OPO

Online Presence Ontology Specification

Working Draft — 13 June 2008

This version:: http://milanstankovic.org/opo/specs/2008/OPO-20080613/
Latest version:: http://milanstankovic.org/opo/specs/
Last Update:: 2008-06-13
Revision:: 0.3
Author:: Milan Stankovic - Université Paris-Sud XI, Orsay
Contributors:: Jelena Jovanovic - Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Belgrade

Abstract

The Online Presence Ontology (OPO) provides the main concepts and properties required to describe information about user's presence in the online world (e.g., on instant messaging platforms and Social Web sites). This document contains a detailed description of the OPO.

Status of this Document

NOTE: This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.

This specification is an evolving document. This document is generated by combining a machine-readable OPO expressed in RDF/XML with a specification template and a set of per-term documents.

Authors welcome suggestions on the OPO and this document. Please send comments to the author. This document may be updated or added to based on implementation experience, but no commitment is made by the authors regarding future updates.

Introduction
1. Terminology and notation
OPO ontology at a glance
OPO ontology overview
1. Example
Cross-reference for OPO classes and properties

1 Introduction

With the appearance of instant messaging (IM) tools and Social Web sites, most notably Social Networks, Internet faced a proliferation of social activities among users. On a typical service that offers some form of social interactions, users present themselves to their contacts by maintaining user profiles. Services that favor direct and frequent communication tend to include descriptions of user’s temporary state in the profile. By the elements of temporary state, we mean primarily custom messages on IM platforms and social networks, as well as description of availability/willingness to chat. Often, visual representations known as avatars are used to depict user’s online persona.

In fact, if we look at the activity of maintaining this kind of user profiles, that activity is no more than creating an image of one self’s presence in the online world, a representation how one wishes to be seen by his/her contacts. The use of custom messages, IM statuses and avatars became a common way for users to make known the character of their presence on some online service and in the online world in general.

Online Presence Ontology represents a part of our effort to enable semantic descriptions of all that data related to one's presence in the online world and to facilitate its exchange among applications. More information will be available on this project on the project's website.

1.1 Terminology and notation

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Namespace URIs of the general form "http://www.example.com/" represent some application-dependent or context-dependent URI as defined in RFC 2396.

The XML Namespace URI that MUST be used by implementations of this specification is: http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/opo/ns# . GGG in the URI stands for Giant Global Graph.

2. OPO ontology at a glance

An alphabetical index of OPO terms, by class (concepts) and by property (relationships, attributes), are given below. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.

Classes: Activity, Contactability, Disturbability, Findability, Notifiability, OnlinePresence, OnlinePresenceComponent, OnlineStatus, OnlineStatusComponent, Visibility,

Properties: IsPresenceComponentOf, avatar, customMessage, declaredBy, declaredOn, declaresOnlinePresence, duration, hasPresenceComponent, hasStatusComponent, inactivityPeriod, isStatusComponentOf, onlineStatusName, startTime,

Instances: Active, AllNotificationsPass, Available, ConstrainedContactability, ConstrainedFindability, DoNotDistrub, FreelyContactable, Inactive, Invisible, NotificationsConstrained, NotificationsProhibited, ProlongedInactive, PubliclyFindable, Visible,

3. OPO ontology overview

The core class in OPO is OnlinePresence. It represents a placeholder for all the aspects of a user’s presence in the online world. In order to enable representation of new, currently unpredictable, aspects of presence in the online world, we defined a class, OnlinePresenceComponent, to represent an abstract component of the OnlinePresence. Relying on the current state of practice in the area of online social interactions we have defined three components of Online Presence: Online Status, Notifiability and Findability (for better understanding please see the figure below).

The notion of Notifiability helps to distinguish the inclination towards interaction with other users from the willingness to be notified by an application (e.g. a chat platform) when a request for interaction arrives. It is used to specify the user's attitude towards receiving notifications while hi/she is present on a service. This can be declared using the Notifiability component, by assigning one of the different Notifiability instances (e.g., AllNotificationsPass, NotificationsProhibited, NotificationsConstrained) to the OnlinePresence.

Findability is a component meant to describe the possibility of other users to access a person’s contact details and online presence data. The approach for defining Findability is the same as with Notifiability. Different predefined instances are used to denote various states of Findability (e.g., PubliclyFindable and ConstrainedFindability).

The OnlineStatus represents what one may call availability for chat – the status used by IM platforms. In order to enable representation of IM status scales used on different IM platforms, we introduced the class OnlineStatusComponent, to denote different dimensions of OnlineStatus. We defined the following components of the Online Status: Activity, Contactability, Disturbability, Visibility. Different OnlineStatuses can be defined by combining instances of those OnlineStatusComponents (please see the example). The predefined instances of OnlineStatusComponents are shown on the figure below.

opo

3.1. Example

Here is a very basic document describing a user's OnlinePresence in Turtle syntax:

  
      @prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>.

  @prefix opo: <http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/opo/ns#>.

      <http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/foaf.rdf#milstan> opo:declares :MyCurrentPresence.

      :MyCurrentPresence rdf:type opo:OnlinePresence;

  opo:customMessage "just watching the game, having a bud";

  opo:avatar <http://www.milanstankovic.org/img/malaSlika.jpg>;

        opo:hasPresenceComponent :MyOnlineStatus, opo:AllNotificationsPass, opo:PubliclyFindable.

      :MyOnlineStatus rdf:type opo:OnlineStatus;

        opo:hasStatusComponent opo:Active, opo:Available, opo:Visible, opo:FreelyContactable.

This brief example introduces the basics of OPO. It says that a resource http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/foaf.rdf#milstan, that is in fact elsewhere defined as a foaf:Agent, is declaring its presence in the online world. In order to identify that presence in further statements, we have assigned the identifier #MyCurrentPresence to it.

The following lines list the properties of #MyCurrentPresence. First we definethe type of #MyCurrentPresence as opo:OnlinePresence, and then we specify its properties:

opo:customMessage is set to "just watching the game, having a bud";
opo:avatar is set to http://www.milanstankovic.org/img/malaSlika.jpg;
Three opo:OnlinePresenceComponents are assigned to define different aspects of Online Presence: #MyOnlineStatus (that will be explained later), opo:AllNotificationsPass (as an instance of opo:Notifiability) and opo:PubliclyFindable (as an instance of opo:Findability). In this way, the Online Presence of the foaf:Agent is characterized in terms of its components, by choosing the appropriate instance for each component.

In the last part, #MyOnlineStatus is declared as opo:OnlineStatus and defined in terms of its components. The following instances are assigned: opo:Active (as an instance of opo:Activity), opo:Available (as an instance of opo:Availability), opo:Visible (as an instance of opo:Visibility), opo:FreelyContactable (as an instance of opo:Contactability). Defined like this, this Online Status corresponds to SkypeMe mode, the most active and most available IM Status used.

4. Cross-reference for OPO classes and properties

Class: opo:Activity

URI: http://ggg.milanstankovic.org/opo/ns#Activity

Activity - OnlineStatusComponent used to represent the state of Activity of the Agent (e.g., Active, Inactive, ProlongedInactive).

sub-class-of:: opo:OnlineStatusComponent
in-domain-of:: opo:inactivityPeriod

OPO

Online Presence Ontology Specification

Working Draft — 13 June 2008

Abstract

Status of this Document

Table of Contents

Appendices

1 Introduction

1.1 Terminology and notation

2. OPO ontology at a glance

3. OPO ontology overview

4. Cross-reference for OPO classes and properties

Class: opo:Activity

Class: opo:Contactability

Class: opo:Disturbability

Class: opo:Findability

Class: opo:Notifiability

Class: opo:OnlinePresence

Class: opo:OnlinePresenceComponent

Class: opo:OnlineStatus

Class: opo:OnlineStatusComponent

Class: opo:Visibility

Property: opo:IsPresenceComponentOf

Property: opo:avatar

Property: opo:customMessage

Property: opo:declaredBy

Property: opo:declaredOn

Property: opo:declaresOnlinePresence

Property: opo:duration

Property: opo:hasPresenceComponent

Property: opo:hasStatusComponent

Property: opo:inactivityPeriod

Property: opo:isStatusComponentOf

Property: opo:onlineStatusName

Property: opo:startTime

Instance: opo:Active

Instance: opo:AllNotificationsPass

Instance: opo:Available

Instance: opo:ConstrainedContactability

Instance: opo:ConstrainedFindability

Instance: opo:DoNotDistrub

Instance: opo:FreelyContactable

Instance: opo:Inactive

Instance: opo:Invisible

Instance: opo:NotificationsConstrained

Instance: opo:NotificationsProhibited

Instance: opo:ProlongedInactive

Instance: opo:PubliclyFindable

Instance: opo:Visible

A References

B Changes in this version

C Acknowledgements