Managing Presence and Policies in Social Network dependent systems

Social Networks have recently experienced a significant increase in popularity and are now an integral part of millions of people´s daily lives. Through these Social Networks, users create profiles, build relationships, and join groups forming intermingled sets and communities. There is a wealth of information within Social Networks, which if exploited properly and combined with rules and policies, can lead to a whole new level of smart contextual services. A mechanism is therefore needed to extract data from heterogeneous Social Networks, link profiles across different networks and aggregate the data obtained. We design a Presence and Policies Server that manages the information exchange between Social Networks, services and the environment and passes along the relevant information and rules to different entities. The Presence and Policies server is capable of querying, importing and aggregating data from across multiple Social Networks and services and then converting that data into standardized semantic information that can be interpreted and translated into meaningful information by other users and services.