The Message without the Medium: Unifying Modern Mes- saging Paradigms through the Semantic Web
its inception, the Internet has been a hotbed of successful communications channels, starting off with e-mail, Internet Relay Chat and Usenet newsgroups and more recently adding weblogs, instant messaging, and news feeds. These systems have been de- veloped quite independently over the past half cent ury and con- tinue to be extended with new functionality that ad dresses the broadening needs of their users and supports the fu ll range of semantic expression. Stepping back, however, we observe that having a variety of messaging frameworks creates si gnificant problems for users when attempting to manage and collate mes- sages on a single topic or context that may be disc ussed via multi- ple media. We posit that no message should be const rained in this way by its medium. As it is, messaging applications are slowly converging in their functionalities. We show that a unified ap- proach to messaging can be achieved in a single ste p through appropriate use of the RDF, a Semantic Web technology, as a data model. We further exploit this data model to develo p appropriate user interface elements that allow aggregation of m essages across protocols, and discuss the benefits that arise from such a scenario.