g-Off.net | Geoffrey Foster

COMP 4905 – Honours Project

In 2006 I completed my honours project titled "Semantic Social Instant Messaging via XMPP". The following was the original description of the project:

Online social networking websites are abundent, and yet they are all lacking a key aspect, real-time
communication and socializing between the members of the network. Additionally, each social
networking website is disconnected from the rest resulting in plenty of duplicated data since users will
often sign up on multiple networks. The aim of this project is to create a new means for developing
social networks by utilizing the existing standards of the XMPP/Jabber instant messaging protocol and
utilizing RDF as a means to store information about the people contained within a social network and
SPARQL to query it.

By using the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) the social network that is
constructed becomes tightly integrated with instant messaging and thus provides a means for users to
interact with one another directly. Also, utilizing instant messaging for constructing social networks is a
natural extension of the idea of instant messaging since a “buddy list” is essentially a social network
with one degree of separation.

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the primary technology stemming from the Semantic
Web that will be utilized by this project. It provides an excellent mechanism for storing data about
people and their relationships with others. In particular the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project provides
a schema for this very purpose.

Once the social networks are constructed, the ability to perform distributed searches for people with
different interests, traits, or essentially anything becomes possible. This aspect of the project involves
creating a method for sending RDF queries throughout the social network. These queries will be sent
through the network in a peer-to-peer manner utilizing the instant messaging capabilities of XMPP.

The major component of this project will be the creation of the protocols used for constructing and
searching the social networks. The ideal solutions to these problems will minimize the total network
traffic generated by the process while maximizing the amount of information that is received.

Download my Honours Paper

I will attempt to post source-code and binaries (although they are outdated) in the near future.