The MobiSoC middleware for mobile social computing: challenges, design, and early experiences

Recently, we started to experience a shift from physical communities to virtual communities, which leads to missed social opportunities in our daily routine. For instance, we are not aware of neighbors with common interests or nearby events. Mobile social computing applications (MSCAs) promise to improve social connectivity in physical communities by leveraging information about people, social relationships, and places. This paper presents MobiSoC, a middleware that enables MSCAs development and provides a common platform for capturing, managing, and sharing the social state of physical communities. Additionally, it incorporates algorithms that discover previously unknown emergent geosocial patterns to augment this state. To demonstrate Mo-biSoC's feasibility, we implemented and tested on smart phones two MSCAs for location-based mobile social matching and place-based ad hoc social collaboration.