Social context-aware middleware: A survey

Social context refers to a set of characteristics associated with multiple users such as social tie and group behaviours. By leveraging users' social context, social context-aware applications are able to provide seamless services accordingly, which creates a tremendous amount of economic and social value. To obtain social context, social context-aware applications need to collect and process various data over heterogeneous hardware and software platforms, which brings critical challenges for application developers. To address the above-mentioned challenges, social context-aware middleware is proposed to offer social tie inference, group detection services and thus facilitating the application development. In this paper, we provide a software architecture that contains the main services provided by a social context-aware middleware. We then systematically survey and classify the existing works on social context-aware middleware. Finally, we discuss open challenges and point out the emerging directions in designing social context-aware middleware.