A Unified Abstraction for Messaging on the Semantic Web

1. OVERVIEW Since its inception, the Internet has been a hotbed of several successful communications channels, starting off with e-mail, IRC and newsgroups and more recently adding web annotation, instant messaging (IM), and news feeds. Although these channels were developed fairly independently, in many cases their respective functionalities and uses have grown to overlap significantly. For instance, users often have separate identifiers for e-mail, chat, and instant messaging, and clients for these systems all have their own implementations of threaded message views. Furthermore, multiple modalities may be involved in the completion of a single task: to notify a friend that you are going to be out for the day, you may start off using IM but switch to e-mail if he or she is not online. We believe these peculiarities stem from a lack of a common data model and user interface.