Difference between revisions of "OMPlanet/Description"

Revision as of 02:27, 30 January 2012

The Planetary System

We use the planetary system analogy to help explain the architecture of the OMPlanet network ecosystem.

Here, the nodes that constitute the network are the OMPlanet platforms, represented by the planets. Each user, organization or a community can have its own hosted planet and it will belong to its community. On their planet the users can control their private data and applications of interaction.

Users will be able to interact with each other within their planet as well as with users of other planets. Planets have 1 to 12 different dimensions of interaction that include social networking, file sharing, offering services, banking, etc. Users can also interact across different dimensions of interaction, wherever such interoperability is possible.

The advantages of the OMPlanet planetary system is that it is community-centric - each group of users controls its own planet with its data and services, it is poly-centric - all the ecosystem is federated between different communities, and interoperable - there are agreements between different dimensions of interaction within and between the planets.

Achieving the interoperability of such complex community-based ICT platforms is a complicated process that involves various actors and challenges far beyond technical issues. The right approach will be to 1) create the environment and conditions for such initiatives to start 1) keep the space open for experimentation and 2) invest in creating stronger and neutral coordination and standardization bodies within the ecosystem and externally (e.g. W3C, ISO, etc).

In the analogy with the planetary system, the standardisation body is the sun. The sun holds all the planets in the system in right orbits (provides the standards and common protocols of interaction). Just as the sun is only giving and not taking, whoever has power in decision-making and creates rules should not be the one who benefits from it. (In contrast the rules of existing major social networking or cloud computing services are made differently for each service provider by itself and competing companies are not motivated by the creation of rules that are beneficial for all parties, they rather create closed markets with rules for their own benefit).

This approach will make possible an alternative trend of evolution for the global Internet ecosystem which is now threatened to become a government censured and corporate owned oligopolistic market centralized within few key service providers (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc.). For example with the emerging cloud computing models all the personal user data, applications and services are being increasingly swallowed into the clouds. Millions of users will be reduced into powerless clients unable to do their own computing and completely dependent on commercial cloud service providers. In contrast we offer new models of distributed local/personal clouds each one managed and owned by its community members.

• 12 Dimensions - The technical description of the 12 dimensions of the OMPlanet platform

The GeoSocial Real-time Radar

Sonar

The migration of web services from the PC to mobile devices brings in new dynamics into social network interactions. A new dimensional parameter has entered the scene - real time location information.

To use the full potential of GEOlocation information, OMPlanet is developing its own social radar called FreeSonar. It provides a real-time GEOsocial networking and activity sharing mobile application which has several innovative features:

1. it is a real GEOsocial network with special user interaction scenarios of GEOmetric pattern projections onto a GEOgraphic map.
2. it has special selective visibility features based on keywords which provide better ways to solve user privacy concerns (users can choose to become visible to each other if they are sharing common interests).
3. it is interoperable with a maximum number of dimensions of web services (in the OMPlanet ecosystem it connects People, Places and Events).

• FreeSonar - Free Software Mobile GeoSocial Networking Application for GEOgraphic interaction of People, Places and Events of OMPlanet ecosystem.

The New Taxonomy System

OMPlanet offers a new taxonomy system of collaborative tagging (a folksonomy) called Flower of Life. Each user or community creates a user centric tag-cloud of its own domain called Seed of Life which is then integrated into the main taxonomy called Flower of Life. This is a new type of content organisation, visualisation and navigation:

1. integrated Flower of Life taxonomy is a combination of all "Seed of Life" taxonomies. Such an organisation of tags provides cross-domain linking of people, places, events and other dimensions across the network.
2. Flower and Seed of Life user interfaces are tag-clouds with new intuitive content visualisations arranged in geometric 2D and 3D patterns.
3. tag-based content navigation and thematic search of social media from carefully collected content contributed by members.

• Flower of Life - A new type of folksonomy system with geometric user interfaces to serve as a semantic core shared between different dimensions of OMPlanet ecosystem.