An ontology-based repository for a spontaneous social network

With the latest technological advancements and the popularization of mobile devices nowadays, software development has evolved towards mobility. One of the main uses of mobile devices is to access social networks. They are becoming important tools in people´s life. In this context, the Mingle project has the objective of creating a spontaneous social networks that is mainly accessed by mobile devices, such as smartphones. Mingle uses the concepts of ubiquitous computing to create a notion of spontaneity, i.e, providing a social network adapted to the persons specific location. This article has the goal of presenting an ontology and the persistence model for managing the information inside a specific location (called “Cell” in our model). To evaluate our proposal, two technics were applied: lexical evaluation and application-level evaluation. The first assessment employs the Levenshtein edit distance and compares Mingle with other popular ontologies in the field, while the second one evaluates if we deal with all Mingle requirements.