An Initial Homophily Indicator to Reinforce Context-Aware Semantic Computing

The vast increase of personal sensor information is driving the rise in popularity of context-aware applications. Users crave and very often expect tailored services that are based on the users´ context or personal preferences. The users themselves, using forms, often provide such information. An inference solution typically addresses this problem. In this paper, we present and show by way of a real-world example, the first step towards incorporating information of the user´s social networking behavior in the inference task. We define an initial indicator of a particular social phenomenon, called Homophily, and describe how the indicator measures the presence of homophily at certain moments, also capturing the degree to which it is present. Different from existing indicators, ours lends itself to indicating the presence of homophily in a way that is easier to comprehend, so that it may be easily integrated into and reinforce context-aware semantic computing.