Leveraging the Linked Data Principles for Electronic Communications

In this position paper, I advocate the use of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies to improve online communication. In particular, the Linked Data principles allow users to better integrate multiple forms of online communications, bridging the gap between emails, forums, blogging and microblogging and so on. By lifting message content and metadata to standard formats (using RDF, RDFS, OWL and SPARQL) with a rich, well defined semantics, it is expected that finding information in a mixture of fastly growing user-generated content, conversation and social activities will be easier and more uniform all over the Internet.