Modeling a context-aware friend-of-a-friend(foaf) applications for mobile platforms

Abstract

We live in an era where the evolution of social networks and developments in the field of information technology witnesses and exponential growth. On a daily basis, we have an ever growing, an ever expanding social network users and as a result we affirm an increase of data that is distributed across different platforms. In this paper, we aim to treat the semantic web from the prism of creating a suitable infrastructure for data integration on the web. One of the most promising applications of the semantic web is the presentation of profiles using an RDF (Resource Description Framework) schema called Friend-of-Friend (FOAF) which represents a machine-processable ontology for describing persons, their activities and relations to other people and objects. In order to demonstrate the concept on how to integrate, relate and share information using FOAF, we model and develop a mobile application called "Find professional" which consists in creating, finding and interacting in a context aware fashion with other users via FOAF. The "Find Professional" mobile app can create a FOAF profile either by asking user's direct input or it can utilize other social network profiles such as Facebook for importing user public profiles into FOAF. User profiles represent RDF files that can be read and queried by semantic query languages like SPARQL, which returns data to their user profiles as well as finds professionals in the FOAF app based on user's geographic location. The application is also evaluated with a field usability testing performed against ten randomly picked user from various profiles and backgrounds. Usability testing process did not yield severe problems during application evaluation and comments are more related to user interface rather than difficulty in user task completion.