Status messages for the right audience with an ontology-based approach

In this paper we explore the problems of dedicating status messages to their intended audience on the Web. We present the results of our qualitative user study aimed at revealing the nature of the problem. We then present the existing solutions for directing status messages to their audience and consider their weaknesses. Then, we discuss how semantic Web technologies can be elegantly used to address the problem and what benefits can be driven from their use. Particularly, we rely on the online presence ontology and a way to semantically describe the intended audience of a status message through the notion of sharing space - a group of people bound by a shared property (e.g., a common interest, membership in a certain organization, location, etc.). Apart from ontology extensions, we present a prototype that demonstrates the use of semantic Web technologies in directing status messages to their intended audiences.