12 Dimensions/Description

The OMPlanet network ecosystem is a distributed model of interlinked data systems that expose, exchange and share data among different systems in the network and outside of its boundaries based on decentralized standard descriptions.

The decentralized standard descriptions enable data portability and toolchain interoperability among different database systems, web services and applications. Describing the OMPlanet network ecosystem is similar to an ontology modelling using the RDF specification recommended by W3C. It specifies a set of 12 dimensions each of them representing a specific group of social objects (e.g people, places, events, etc.).

Each of the 12 domains/dimensions is organised into a specific data structure that can be provided/hosted by different platforms and web services with corresponding interfaces. Usually each object is given a unique URI and it has different types of relations with other objects of the same dimension or in relation with objects from possibly all other dimensions/domains.

OMPlanet model resembles to class hierarchies in object-oriented programming but it is more flexible as it is meant to represent information coming from all sorts of heterogeneous data sources. One of the main objectives is to define a compact all-inclusive set of data models to achieve interoperable, simple and uniform design.

We recommend using JSON-LD notation to create evolvable and interoperable RESTful services (JSON-LD is a method of transporting Linked Data using JSON and provides mappings from JSON to an RDF model, JSON-LD requires relatively little effort from developers to transform their existing JSON APIs to JSON-LD).

We have used the following ontology-oriented terms to describe the elements, their properties and relations in the OMPlanet network:

• Dimension: A general descriptive name for the group of object classes in a specific sub-domain, represents the top concept.

• Object Class: The specific class describing the set of objects with the same type. E.g. the class Person to specify all the objects in the domain People.

• Object Properties or Attributes: denotes a relationship between objects, one object can reference to another object/s from the same dimension or from other dimensions: e.g. People object can have relations as friend or co-worker to several other People objects from the same dimension and as well can have several references to Places objects with relation types as work place, home or meeting place, or to Services objects with relations as needed or offering, or references to Events objects as participant or organiser, etc.

• Data Properties Parameters that objects can have. Holds an object's member variable specific to its dimension: e.g. People object can be a user profile with the attributes profile name, unique ID, interest tags, etc.

• Actions: the verbs which show what action is possible to do with the specific object. E.g. share, comment, tag, link, buy, join, help, etc.

• Services: describes specific types of web services that are related to the object class: e.g. social network, geographic map service, etc.

• Structures: describes the data model or the common structure handling with the objects of the specific dimension. E.g. social graph for people, calendar for events, map for places, timeline for projects, etc.

• RDF Schema: provides a data-modelling vocabulary for RDF data.