OMPlanet/Description
The Planetary System
Earth is in an interwoven dance with the Moon and other planets around the Sun, and the Sun in turn flowing in sync with other stars around the Milky Way Galaxy. The Galaxy itself is traveling in a web with other Galaxies that form our Galactic Cluster, and that cluster dances with countless others across the expanding Universe.
Electrons are moving around the Nucleus of an Atom. The Atoms dance in interwoven chains as electromagnetic waves pass from one to another along a helical spiral that becomes DNA. Chains of DNA weave spiral after spiral layer around protein spheres that become Chromosomes, and these in turn radiate energy webs like Galaxies in a cluster that are surrounded by the Nuclear Membrane in the core of a Cell, an entire Universe of life in itself.
The similar patterns exist in human societies and organisations. The patterns of human organisation are projected also onto the online systems and networks, for example as multitudes of social networks and exchange platforms of different types in the Web, but not always in the same natural harmony due to the human factor.
The OMPlanet ecosystem offers the genome of natural organisation: fractal stacking and intercommunication of networks at different levels to grow an ecosystem of interconnected self-organized social networks, in simple words a network of networks.
We use the planetary system analogy to help explain the architecture of the network ecosystem.
Here, the nodes that constitute the network are the OMPlanet platforms, represented as the planets. Each user, organization or community can have its own hosted planet and it will belong to its community. On their collectively owned 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 support 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/planets, and it is 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. We propose the following actions: 1) create the environment and conditions for such initiatives to start 2) keep the space open for experimentation 3) invest in creating stronger and neutral coordination and standardization bodies within the ecosystem and externally (e.g. W3C, ISO, etc).
Keeping the analogy with the planetary system, the central standardization 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', similarly 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 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 - A more detailed technical description of the 12 dimensions of the OMPlanet ecosystem is here.
The GeoSocial Real-time Radar
The migration of web services from the PCs to mobile devices brings in new dynamics into interaction. A new dimensional parameter has entered the scene - real time location information. To use the full potential of spatial information, OMPlanet is developing its own social radar called FreeSonar, it connects the dimensions of People, Places and Events in the OMPlanet ecosystem.
FreeSonar helps to link the virtual world of the Web with the real world, encouraging to interact in real time at real places based on shared activities
- it is a GEOsocial network with new user interaction scenarios using GEOmetric pattern projections onto a GEOgraphic map.
- it has selective visibility features based on tags/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 for example).
- it is interoperable with a maximum number of web services - sharing places of interest, events in near proximity, organizing gatherings, transport sharing, etc.
FreeSonar, wiki - Free Software Mobile GeoSocial Networking Application of OMPlanet ecosystem.
The Starwheel Taxonomy System
OMPlanet offers a concept of new taxonomy system of collaborative tagging (a folksonomy) called Starwheel based on Flower of Life geometry. 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 way for content organisation, visualization and navigation:
- integrated Flower of Life taxonomy is a combination of all smaller "Seed of Life" taxonomies. Such organisation of tags provides cross-domain linking of people, places, events and other dimensions across the various web platforms in the network.
- Flower and Seed of Life user interfaces are tag-clouds with new intuitive content visualization arranged in geometric 2D and 3D patterns.
- tag-based content navigation and thematic search of social media containing selective content contributed by members.
Throughout the OMPlanet ecosystem the Starwheel structures will be the common simple and intuitive interfaces to serve as a link between different dimensions of OMPlanet ecosystem.
Starwheel, wiki - A new type of taxonomy system with geometric user interfaces.
