Managing User Social Context to Enhance Data-Oriented Applications

Abstract

Recently, social networks have gained a huge popularity among internet users, serving diverse purposes and communities. With all the time spent using them, more and more information about their users and tasks are generated, and, consequently, more semantics underlying that could be acquired. Meanwhile, in data-oriented applications, the increasing amount of available data has made it hard for users to find the information they need in the way they consider relevant. To help matters, a user-centric approach may be used to enhance query answering and, particularly, provide query personalization. In this work, we address the issue of personalizing query answers in data-oriented applications considering the user context provided mainly by social network information. Moreover, we propose a user context management service named CODI4In, which offers mechanisms for cache management, context information persistence and recovery, as well as some algorithms for query personalization. To this end, it extracts users' social network information and uses it as context information. In this paper, we present the developed approach, demonstrate its applicability through a context and socially-aware Q&A application and present some results we have obtained.