Design and Development of Semantic Application for Communities

In the recent years, social applications have competed to incorporate emerging technologies and innovative aspects like semantics technologies, location based services, data ephemerality to ensure user privacy, etc. Although few applications combine these aspects, our challenge is to gather them in applications for communities. Likewise due to the limited resources of mobile devices and the growing number of services, context awareness becomes a major requirement in social computing. Applications must be adapted to context constraints (such as the host´s resources, the services properties and the surrounding environments) and must provide appropriate or personalized services. This paper presents features and architectural principles upon which is based the design and the development of our application for fostering spontaneous communities. This kind of communities answers the needs that cannot be solved in perennial communities or may be more effective in circumstantial situations (e.g. Accidents, natural disaster, crisis, fire, etc.). The application provides multiple services in order to satisfy the needs of users sharing a common interest or a common purpose. As a solution for resource constrained device in pervasive environment, we consider a deployment strategy of services based on a semantic web services matching algorithm. The proposed approach has been validated through a prototype called Taldea used by the visitors of a botanical garden.