A framework for social context-aware pervasive computing applications

This thesis introduces a novel framework to address challenges in developing socially-aware applications. The framework includes an approach to model, represent, reason about, and manage different types of social context, and a platform for acquiring, storing, provisioning and managing social context information to aid the development of socially-aware applications. This thesis makes several important research contributions. Firstly, the proposed framework provides an ontology-based social context model, including an upper social context ontology which can be customised and specialised to form domain-specific ontologies. Secondly, the iii framework provides an ontology-based approach to define rules for deriving, deducing and abstracting social context information. It also propose an approach to inferring users’ situations by correlating historical interaction events. Thirdly, the framework provides an ontology-based socially-aware access control policy model and language for owners to control access to their information at different levels of granularity. Fourthly, the framework also provides a way to model and represent runtime social interactions from both the domain- and player-perspectives to support mediated social interactions, and manage their adaptation to cope with the changes in user requirements and environments. Finally, the framework provides a platform for acquiring, storing and provisioning social context information, executing social interaction models and managing their runtime adaptation.