Enabling privacy-preserving semantic presence in instant messaging systems

Abstract

In pervasive environments, presence-based application development via Presence Management Systems (PMSs) is a key factor to optimise the management of communication channels, driving productivity increase. Solutions for presence management should satisfy the interoperability requirements, in turn providing context-centric presence analysis and privacy management. In order to push PMSs towards flexible, open and context-aware presence management, we propose some adaptation of two extensions to standard XML-based XMPP for message exchange in online communication systems. The contribution allows for more complex specification and management of nested group and privacy lists, where semantic technologies are used to map all messages into RDF vocabularies and pave the way for a broader semantic integration of heterogeneous and distributed presence information sources in the standard PMSs framework. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.