Using Mobile Services Based on SNS to Recommend Who, How, and When to Collaborate

The rising popularity of smart phones and social networking services (SNS) is changing many aspects of people´s collaboration. With the wide use of smart phones, collaborative work based on mobile web becomes loose and flexible. Collaborators have more chances to collaborate with other people anywhere at anytime. But most supporting tools for traditional computer supported cooperative work just support defined collaborative process for certain collaborators. They can´t satisfy the new requirements for loose collaboration where collaborators, collaborative process and time are unknown. In this paper, we presentation approach to using three mobile services based on SNS and mobile sensor data to recommend who, how and when to collaborate. This collaborative approach based on mobile services solves three basic key problems of modern collaboration. Firstly, we collect abundant data from SNS, do the semantic analysis, and dig out the suitable collaborators. Secondly, by analyzing the data from calendars and smart phones, we figure out the situations which collaborators are in, then reason the suitable contacts by our novel rules and finally recommend whether we can call or not, as well as the ranked text contacts. Thirdly, we use the calendar information to recommend the common free time for collaborators to work together. To verify the effectiveness of the approach and accuracy of collaborative recommendations, we have implemented an app including the services on android platform and designed two independent experiments. The case studies show the approach provides an effective and accurate means for collaborative recommendations.