Social Ontology and Semantic Actions: Enabling Social Networking Services for Distributed Web Tasking

End-users are confined by the social networking platforms that they invest effort in to set up their social contacts and relationships. The centralized, monopolized, and silo approach of today's social networking providers discourage interoperability across platforms. Enterprises struggle to find a common social networking approach to deal with the diversity of social networking platforms of choice of their users. Though each social networking platform provides their own APIs for externalizing users' social data, they are not designed to interoperate with other platforms. In this paper, we propose Social Ontology and Semantic Actions (SOSA) as a de-centralized, inter-operable social networking model and runtime services that enterprises can use as social networking middleware components for interoperability of social networking platforms of their users. SOSA provides platform agnostic construct for contacts; relationship axiom association with contacts, with inherent inferences to compute memberships given a relationship axiom. SOSA also enables binding with enterprise services as semantic actions of a given relationship axiom. Social relationship can also be used incontext with enterprise services and distributed web tasking.