Contacts ontology

We are using Nepomuk NCO ontology as basis in tracker. We have modified it to suit the needs of the real world applications; this implies some assumptions and some expectations how the ontology must be used. This page collects that knowledge.

Metacontacts

Some contacts come from IM accounts, others from the local addressbook, and we need a way to merge them at ontology level.

Authors

• Ivan Frade, Tracker <ivan.frade@nokia.com>

• Ian Monroe, Telepathy <ian.monroe@collabora.co.uk>

Changes introduced in Nepomuk

• New classes

  • nco:MetaContact

  • nco:IMContact (subclass of nfo:PersonContact). It is a person contact that comes from an IM Account.

  • nco:PresenceStatus a class that contains predefined instances with presence levels. These levels are taken from Telepathy Spec

• New properties
  • nco:fromIMAccount (nco:IMContacts, nco:IMAccount)
    • Indicates that the IM Contact and its details has been imported from certain IM Account.

  • nco:metacontact (nco:PersonContact, nco:MetaContact)

  • nco:imContactID, nco:imContactNickname, nco:imContactStatusMessage to set this information in the nco:IMContact
  • nco:imDisplayName, nco:imEnable, nco:imAccountAvatar to nco:IMAccount representing this information about 'me'.
• Changed properties:

  • nco:hasIMAccount (nco:Role, nco:IMAccount) -> nco:hasIMAccount (nco:PersonContact, nco:IMAccount)

    • Different semantic: it indicates that a PersonContact has an IM account in certain service/server. Technically only 'me' in the ontology will have IM Accounts configured.

  • nco:imStatus (nco:IMAccount, xsd:string) -> nco:imPresence (nco:IMAccount, nco:PresenceStatus)

• Other changes:
  • Added predefined instance for "me": nco:default-contact-me

Diagram

Contact-metacontact.png

Description of the changes

• It is important to understand that there are "my accounts" in jabber, gmail, MSN... and there are the contacts inside each of those accounts.

• A nco:PersonContact can have nco:IMAccounts using the property nco:hasIMAccount. Conceptually, only the predefined user "me" can have IMAccounts, but that restriction is not included in the ontology)

• After logging in an IMAccount, we can retrieve contacts from there. Those new contacts are nco:IMContact, and are linked with the account they come
  • from via nco:fromIMAccount
• IMAccount contain the details of user 'me' (imNickname, imPresence, imStatusMessage...). To store the same information about the remote contacts, we have similar properties for IMContact (imContactNickname, imContactPresence,...)

• Every contact can be linked with (at most) one nco:MetaContact.

  • We can understand "MetaContact" as the person in the real world, "PersonContact" what we add by hand or via sync to our address book, and "IMContact" what comes from IM services. So multiple Person/IM Contacts can be linked with one (but only one) MetaContact. This link is done with the nco:metacontact property.

• When two contacts refer to the same person in the real world, they should share the same nco:MetaContact instance.

• The picture/avatar of the nco:IMContacts is set with nco:photo (inherited from nco:Contact), while 'my' avatar in an account is set with nco:imAccountAvatar.

Implementation / Open issues

• Is it mandatory to have a MetaContact instance per individual contact? or only after merge?

• MetaContact contains any information or is just an ID to merge contacts?