Urbiflock: An experiment in dynamic group management in Pervasive social applications

Pervasive social applications are applications that enable end users to interact and share information on the move. In these applications, the concept of a user group plays a central role as it models the user´s social networks. Most pervasive social applications today model these user groups as simple lists of users that have to be manually managed by the user to reflect the changes in a frequently changing context. Managing user groups in current frameworks is complicated because of three main reasons. There is a lack of abstractions (i) to discover users on the move, (ii) to organize these users in composable context-aware user groups, and (iii) to manage the communication between the users and groups of users. Our research focuses on providing proper abstractions to deal with the specific characteristics of user groups in pervasive social applications. In this paper we describe Urbiflock, a framework which aids the programmer in managing the complexity of implementing such dynamic user groups. Furthermore, we describe a messaging system called Guanotes which has been developed by means of our framework and exploits dynamic user groups to enable context-aware message propagation among mobile users.