[JDEV] jabber/im application idea

Fri Jan 4 08:38:49 CST 2002

good folk,

after lurking a bit and waddling through the documentation, i have a
couple of thoughts i'd appreciate comments on, having to do with what
i'd like to use jabber for:

i've always wanted something i'll loosely call "annotations on the
web", a means by which i and other users can create annotations for
different URLs, and be able to share these annotations amongst
ourselves.  there have been a variety of different approaches to this,
but i haven't yet encountered one that was satisfying: they almost all
usually necessarily involve a central annotations storage server for
all the annotations made by that system, and some kind of helper
application or applet, maybe even actual page re-writing.  this has
always struck me as too heavy weight, and dependent on remote services
for storage as well as communication.

a little while ago, after i'd been using instant messaging for work a
while, it occured to me that the IM/p2p-ish model might be a better
place for this kind of annotations: i for one really only want to
check on annotations made by people or orgs that i actually know
(read: in my roster).  that could be my acquaintances, it could be the
collected annotations of a scholarly society i belong to, a listserv
i'm on, what have you.

from my reading of the docs on the protocol (and please to make
corrections if i am off base here, or if this might be differently
stated), we might imagine annotations conversations like this in
jabber:

    query:

        <iq type="get" to="..." from="...">
          <query type="jabber:iq:annotation">
            <annotation type="uri-exact" 
                        value="http://some.where.com/over/the/rainbow/"/>
          </query>
        </iq>

    and response:

        <iq type="result" to="..." from="...">
          <query type="jabber:iq:annotation">
            <annotation type="uri-exact" 
                        value="http://some.where.com/over/the/rainbow/">
              <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
                 <!-- ... some xhtml-basic content, 
                          deathless prose, no doubt ... -->
              </html>
            </annotation>
          </query>
        </iq>

    where we can imagine query types of at least things like
    'uri-exact', 'uri-prefix', 'domain', and even other things like
    ISSN/ISBN or DOI or SICI.

one could certainly send and reply to such messages right now by hand
in jabber.  what would be more interesting is for a jabber client to
receive such a query, and look in whatever content store of
annotations were available, and respond automatically (assuming that
identities and subscription rights all permitted, natch...).  so, in
my jabber client, i would choose an option like "see if anyone in my
roster has an annotation for *this*", and then results would come back
if there were any.

behind that scenario are myriad implementational details.  i think
that this does generalize from just annotations to anything that you'd
want to share amongst acquaintances and grows over time, and probably
generalizes further than that.

is anyone working on or know of anything even remotely similar to this
kind of functionality/usage?  does this seem an
interesting/appropriate usage for the jabber substrate?  better forum
to discuss this sort of thing?  any and all comments are appreciated.
thanks!

cheers,
nigel