SocAware: A Middleware for Social Applications in Online Social Networks

The popularity of online social network (OSN) services has given rise to a variety of social network applications. However these applications lack a common platform for information sharing and people interoperating. In this paper, we propose SocAware, a middleware designed for OSN services. SocAware extracts social relation from heterogeneous networks, and builds a uniform knowledge base to manage the social information. SocAware distinguishes itself from other OSN middlewares by analyzing the OSN activities to classify the social relations, and by calculating the strength of social relations to provide reusability between social applications. We also provide a set of API to facilitate third-party application development and the effective utilization of these relations. In order to validate SocAware, we developed two prototype applications above the middleware. The experimental results demonstrate the usability and expansibility of the middleware.