Including location, calendar and contact data in the ontology

Following the discussion at the recent face to face I would like to 
consider how to extend the delivery context ontology to cover 
location, calendar and contact info, based upon existing work.

Privacy concerns are clearly very important for such data and this 
will act as a brake on application developers. This is something I 
intend to address with a forthcoming W3C workshop in 2Q'08. I am 
expecting the business models for providing such services to move 
through a sequence of phases. A proprietary walled garden approach 
is likely to give way to a more open approach as the necessary 
standards are put in place, and this will in turn enable a much 
bigger pool of developers to innovate with new kinds of applications 
that exploit location, calendar and contact data.

Work on the ontology for such data is a reasonable first step 
towards open standards for web applications as the ontology is 
decoupled from specific APIs and from the associated access control 
mechanisms. The extensions to the delivery context ontology should 
in my opinion be based upon existing work, e.g.

  1) For location we could leverage

   - JSR179, a location API for Java midlets
   - GPX, an XML format for exchanging location data
   - EXIF extensions for tagging photos with location

  2) For calendar info, we could leverage vCal and iCalendar

  3) For contact info, we could leverage vCard

Google has been doing some potentially related work on common APIs 
for building social applications on many websites, see:

     http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

It currently covers personal profiles, friend relationships, actions 
such as uploading a video file, and a persistence API for accessing 
data held on the website. It is therefore reasonable to envisage an 
expanding collection of APIs for distributed socially oriented web 
applications, for example access to location as part of your 
friend's presence information.

We need to discuss the role of standards for ontologies as a means 
to avoid market fragmentation, and how to avoid bottle-necks in the 
development of such standards.

I will try to post some more detailed suggestions prior to this 
week's telecon.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2007 17:44:00 UTC