This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

The Internet of Things (IoT) assumes that things interact and exchange information thus defining the future of pervasive computing environments. The integration between people and interconnected objects realizes a new physical and social space and opens new frontiers in context awareness and objects adaptation. In this paper we investigate the possibility of creating socially aware objects able to interact not only among themselves but also with human beings sharing the same environment. The main contribution of this work is to provide a knowledge model for social context-awareness and reasoning using an ontology-based context modeling, a user model and exploiting of social networks. This model is part of a larger framework called So Smart that aims at empowering networks of interconnected objects with social context awareness in order to improve their social interaction with people

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Smart objects are gradually integrating into people's everyday life. While many context-aware solutions for pervasive computing environments do not consider users social aspects, we believe smart objects should be social-aware. So Smart aims at filling the gap in social understanding of the user environment, presenting an ontology based context model to support social context representation and automated social context reasoning.

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