Universal Social Network Bus

Abstract

Services (OSNSs) are changing the fabric of our society, impacting almost every aspect of it. Over the last decades, the aggressive market rivalry has led to the emergence of multiple competing, "closed" OSNSs. As a result, users are trapped in the walled gardens of their OSNS, encountering restrictions about what they can do with their personal data, the people they can interact with and the information they get access to. As an alternative to the platform lock-in, "open" OSNSs promote the adoption of open, standardized APIs. However, users still massively adopt closed OSNSs to benefit from the services' advanced functionalities and/or follow their "friends", although the users' virtual social sphere is ultimately limited by the OSNSs they join. Our work aims at overcoming such a limitation by enabling users to meet and interact beyond the boundary of their OSNSs, including reaching out to "friends" of distinct closed OSNSs. We specifically introduce USNB-Universal Social Network Bus, which revisits the "service bus" paradigm that enables interoperability across computing systems, to address the requirements of "social interoperability". USNB features synthetic profiles and personae for interaction across the boundaries of-closed and open- ,-profile-and non-profile-based-OSNSs through a reference social interaction service. We ran a 1-day workshop with a panel of users who experimented with the USNB prototype to assess the potential benefits of social interoperability for social network users. Results show the positive evaluation of users for USNB, especially as an enabler of applications for civic participation. This further opens up new perspectives for future work, among which, enforcing security and privacy guarantees.

Social Participation Network: Linking Things, Services and People to Support Participatory Processes

“…The work we presented here is preliminary and there are still open questions regarding the conceptualisation and implementation of Social Participation Networks. As part of our ongoing and future work, we are developing key technical aspects of our architecture design, such as the integration of heterogeneous IoT devices and software services, as part of the extension of the Universal Social Network Bus [3]. We are also studying the definition of additional social participation network rules to automatically learn and adapt the embedded participatory links.…”

“…We have previously introduced the social middleware solution to address such interoperability requirements [2]. In particular, social middleware leverages the Universal Social Network Bus [3] which mediates interaction across online communication technologies to overcome the platform lock-in. Participatory OSNS Architecture: Building on the above contributions and state-of-the-art technology building blocks, Fig.…”