A Unified Abstraction for Messaging on the Semantic Web
Since its inception, the Internet has been a hotbed of several successful communications channels, starting off with e-mail, Internet Relay Chat and Usenet newsgroups and more recently adding Web annotation, instant messaging, and news feeds. However, these channels were developed fairly independently, and in many cases their respective functionalities have grown to overlap significantly. For instance, users of these systems have separate identifiers for e-mail, chat, and instant messaging, and clients for these systems all have their own implementations of threaded message views. We believe these problems stem from a lack of a common user interface and data model. In this paper we use basic concepts from the Semantic Web and RDF to unify and model these seemingly disparate messaging paradigms. We also demonstrate a generalized user interface for messaging that uses the data model we have developed. From this process we realize a number of synergies that result from the reduction of overlap and the finer-grained control users are given over message composition, transmission, storage and retrieval.