Towards Ambient Community Services

The present paper introduces the innovative concept of a new type of services, called ambient community services (ACS). The ACS concept utilizes information that resides in communities of mobile terminals, such as location, speed, sensor-related data or user-created multimedia content. After the collection, processing and filtering of these data, a number of innovative, heterogeneous value-added applications can be provided to the end-users, such as the provision of vehicular traffic conditions. ACS advances the social networking by allowing users to form cooperative, service-enabling communities. This paper includes a thorough description of the state-of- the-art, the proposed system architecture and communication flow, potential enabled applications, important implementation aspects, as well as future research activities.