12 Dimensions

OMPlanet 12 Dimensions

The OMPlanet ecosystem has 12 dimensions each of them representing a specific sphere of human activity interlinked/projected on a specific web platform or a service.

Explained in the object oriented design style each dimension contains objects specific to its domain which are interacting and in relation with each other as well as with objects from possibly all other dimensions. One of main objectives is to achieve interoperability by clear and uniform design.

We have used the terms 'Data', 'Functions', 'Relations' or 'Services' to describe the specificity of each dimension:

Data holds an object's member variables specific to its dimension: e.g. People object is a user profile and as its data contains profile name, unique ID, interest tags, etc.

Relations holds relational references to other objects 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.

Services describes specific types of web services that are requried to provide in a client-server way: e.g. globally unique ID generation or shared geographic map services, etc.

People

People with their social graphs and profiles. Objects of People are user profiles from different social graphs with extendable profile fields.

Data: User unique ID (e.g. WebID), user name, profile details, messaging space (e.g. inbox, wall), etc.

Functions: Send message, send object, ...

Relations: Each person contains also relational references to other persons (list of friends),
  as well relational references to other objects from other OMPlanet dimensions (e.g. Places, Events, etc.).

Services: might be necessary centralized functionalites of social networking for global user authentication, search for profiles, offline messaging.

Examples:
 • PeerSon - p2p social network
 • OpenSocialWeb - creating a free, open, and decentralized social network
 • OAuth - an open standard for authorization, allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists)
 • StatusNet - federated social network
 • Facebook - centralized proprietary social network

Groups

Dimension that holds objects which are representing different types of virtual or non-virtual groups of people sharing common interests.

Data: E.g. groups representing workplace, college or virtual community.

Relations: Each object contains also list of People objects as its members and
  possibly relations to other related objects (e.g. Services, Projects, Events, etc.)

Services:

Examples:
  • Virtual groups of people, social networks, discussion groups, forums, virtual games, etc. 
  • Non-virtual communities of people (sharing living or working space) - Global Ecovillage Network

Places

A place as a logical description of an area such as a park, university, organization, etc. (whereas a location is a geographic coordinate with longitude and latitude).

This enables users to instantly form communities based on location, to identify specific places and to provide location-based histories (such as every important event that occurred at a specific address).

Data: Description of the place of interest, information about its type, characteristics and the geo location data (longitude, latitude).

Relations: Events (event calendar of the place), Services (provided at the place), People (as members), etc.

Services: Web based maps with layers representing OMPlanet objects (Google Maps, Bing Mpas, etc.).

Examples: Google Places, Facebook Places

Events, Activities

For self-organized activities or events. People can publish real-time information about their current activity in their current location, initiate new activities, organize events or look for real-time events happening around them, or publish a demand for a specific type of event in a given area.

OMPlanet also provides distributed calendars to share and search events globally. hCalendar can be used as a simple, distributed calendaring and events format.

Data: Local Events, Concerts, Festivals, Workshops, Parties, etc. Past, present, upcoming.

Relations: 

Services: Services to publish events, register to an existing event or demand/propose future events.
  - Search for events by time, location, performer or descriptive keyword.
  - Alerts which automatically notify users when events matching their search criteria are added or modified.
  - Post feedback/question by People to past/upcoming events.
  - Events Calendar (Aggregation and user friendly visualization of selective calendars from the global calendar
  selected by a user according to his/her interests. subscription to such personalized views of calendars.) (e.g. Eventful)

Examples: 
  • Eventful, Eventbright

Travel, Transport

Travel sharing, route sharing and planning. For example car charing on the go, with alerts on mobile devcies, can allow drivers to take travelers if destinations match. This can reduce the amount of cars driving 3/4 empty.

Data: Start point (Longitude, Latitude), Endpoint(Longitude, Latitude), Direction (NE,NW, etc.),
  Available Places(how many more can join), Means of Travel(Car, Bike, etc),
  Purpose of Travel(Description), Places to Visit(Places objects), Traveling People(People objects).

Relations: 

Services: 

Examples:
  • Travel sharing: GPS rout matches, etc.
  • Place-to-stay sharing: CouchSurfing, Airbnb
  • P2P Car Sharing: ...

Projects

Data:

Relations: 

Services: 

Examples: 
  • Free software development projects, environmental volunteering projects, business projects...

Services

Free service exchange markets. Direct service for service exchange portals with virtual currencies or having the 'spend-time' as a currency unit.

Data: 

Relations:

Services: 

Examples: 
  • Couch-sharing: CouchSurfing, Hospitality Club
  • Car-sharing, garden-sharing, training-sharing, etc.
  • Community insurance: Friendsurance

Transparent Banks

Transparent and fair lending or currency exchange systems with social, virtual, peer-to-peer or real currencies. Peer-to-peer currency means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network.

Data: 

Relations:

Services: 

Examples: 
  • Digital currencies: Bitcoin,
  • Crowdfunding: ....
  • Peer to Peer lending, Microfinancing: KIVA
  • Crowd funded mortgage: Crowdhyptheek
  • Banks: WIR Bank, JAK Medlemsbank
  • The Visa card system designed by Dee Hock is a good example of such attempt
  • MonedaBcn, a social network created to build a social currency alternative to money in the area of Barcelona and surroundings.

- https://barcelona.ecoxarxes.cat/ Interest free, owned by members, all transactions are transparent and trackable. It is possible to use it for funding projects - projects can publish public list of needed recources and volunteers can donate and choose for what need their contribution is going to be used and track it.

Products

Free-markets of material goods. Data:

Relations:

Services: 

Examples: 
  • Buyin, selling, exchanging: eBay, etc.
  • Democratizing 3D printing: Bits From Bytes

P2P Files

Data: Represents digital files that can be shared through network.

Relations:

Services:

Examples:
  • P2P file sharing, torrents, web sites content

Federated WWW

Federated/Decentralized World Wide Web: federated interoparable web services, decentralized interoperable social networks, federated microblogging sites, decentralized DNS systems, etc.

Data:

Relations: 

Services: 

Examples:
  • Federated social networks: StausNet, OStatus, etc.
  • P2P hosting of web site contents.
  • Decentralized p2p based DNS systems: P2P-DNS

Open Space

...

Architecture

Federation and Interoperability

By providing the federation and interoperability of platforms and web services, OMPlanet aims to make an ecosystem not fallible to attempts of exploiting or manipulating it for personal benefit, to centralize and misappropriate resources for vested interests of a few entities.

Federated networks are designed upon the same principles of confederation. In simple words: in a federated environment there are many service providers from different domains for similar types of service but they are all interconnected and it is possible for the users to interact across the platforms. Everyone is able to choose his/her preferred platform to access his/her web service (e.g. social network) which is in turn interoperable with other platforms.

Public Web Services

However preferable it is to have such platforms interacting in federated or peer-to-peer manner with decentralized management and all data in distributed servers and DBs, it is too complex to make it possible without using some global centralised services. For example to make available services such as unique ID generation, user authentication, offline messaging, sharing access to public/protected data, etc., centralized public web services and centrilized data storage is necessary.

Considering these limitations, the OMPlanet ecosystem will also hold public client-server based systems. The necessary services and servers will be transparently maintained by community volunteer efforts. Explained in P2P logic there needs to be enough super-peers that are willing to host some part of server functionality and light-weight peers who are only users in the environment (e.g. users accessing via limited mobile devices).

Below is one of the early stage sketches of the ecosystem that represents real world dimensions interacting with OMPlanet public web services.