Context-Aware Middleware for Anytime, Anywhere Social Networks

Anytime, anywhere social computing requires several support mechanisms and tools, including location and proximity systems, expressive representation models of physical place and user characteristics, and effective social-matching algorithms. Anytime, anywhere social-network computing also requires shared and interoperable vocabularies for modeling location and entity characteristics. Current solutions tend to address only a subset of these issues. We believe that the success of anytime, anywhere social computing depends on middleware solutions that separate social-network management concerns from application requirements. Our middleware solution, the socially aware and mobile architecture (SAMOA), integrates a set of common management facilities for personalizing location-dependent social networks, and for propagating social networks' visibility up to the application level.