Ubiquitous conference management system for mobile recommendation services based on mobilizing social networks: A case study of u-conference

In this paper, we propose a social network-based mechanism to be aware of user contexts and to provide contextually relevant mobile services to users. A social network among users is regarded as the channel for exchanging and propagating their contexts. To efficiently discover the contexts of a certain users the contexts of his neighbors can be fused to provide mobile recommendation service to mobile subscribers. However, since the social network of a user has been fragmented into more than one, it is difficult to put the number of contexts from the fragmented social networks together (Jung, 2009b). Thereby, we mobilize all possible on- and off-line social networks to build an ego-centric social network. We have implemented the proposed system, which is called u-conference system, by collecting the social network dataset from online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, CyWorld, and co-authoring patterns in major Korean journals) and offline (e.g., co-participation patterns in a number of Korean domestic conferences). Once we have implemented the system, we have provided mobile services to the conference participants by sending text messages about time schedule of relevant presentations.