Pervasive Middleware Goes Social: The SAPERE Approach

Pervasive computing middleware, to support the spatially and socially situated activities of users, has to effectively support both self-organizing spatial activities and social models of interactions. In this paper, we present the solution that we are going to integrate in the SAPERE middleware to tackle this problem. The basic idea is to exploit the graph of a social network (e.g., Face book), in conjunction with relations deriving from spatial proximity, to drive and rule the actual topology of interactions among devices, users, and services. The approach can facilitates the autonomous and adaptive activities of pervasive services while accounting for both social and spatial issues, can support effective service discovery and orchestration, and can enable tackling critical privacy issues.