Directing Status Messages to their Audience in Online Communities

— In this paper we present the results of our user study about status message sharing on the Social Web. The study revealed the privacy and information noise (sometimes originating from gap of understanding and sometimes from lack of significance) to be the key problems in the domain and allowed us to unveil their nature. Further on we present the existing solutions and workarounds for those problems and introduce the idea that Semantic Web technologies could help confront those problems in a more complete way. We propose a way to use semantic descriptions of status messages, their intended audiences and distributed data about users to direct status messages to their intended recipients. Particularly, we rely on the Online Presence Ontology as a vocabulary for exposing status message semantics, and we provide necessary extensions to support status message directing.