With the increased prevalence of advanced mobile devices (the so-called “smart” phones), interest has grown in mobile social ecosystems (MSEs), where users not only access traditional Web-based social networks using their mobile devices, but are also able to use the context information provided by these devices to further enrich their interactions.
Owing to the large variety of platforms available for smart phones, as well as the different ways that data and context information is represented, it is natural to think of middleware solutions that the developers of these systems can use while creating their applications.
The design and development of a middleware support platform for mobile social applications (or a MSE management middleware) is challenging and must address a number of issues:
We are developing a middleware framework for managing mobile social ecosystems. We envisage a multi-layer middleware architecture consisting of modules which will provide the needed functionalities, including:
Our middleware adopts a graph-based model for representing social data, where nodes and arcs describe socially relevant entities and their connections. In particular, we exploit the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a basic Semantic Web standard language that allows representing and reasoning about social vocabulary, and creating an interconnected graph of socially relevant information from different sources.
[Icon credits: Icon Etc.]