Yarta: A Middleware for Managing Mobile Social Ecosystems

Abstract

Abstract. With the increased prevalence of advanced mobile devices (the so-called "smart" phones), interest has grown in mobile social ecosystems, where users not only access traditional Web-based social networks using their mobile devices, but are also able to use the context information provided by these devices to further enrich their interactions. In complex mobile social ecosystems of the future the heterogeneity of software platforms on constituent nodes, combined with their intrinsic distributed nature and heterogeneity of representation of data and context raises the need for middleware support for the development of mobile social applications. In this paper, we propose Yarta, a novel middleware designed for mobile social ecosystems (MSE), which takes into account the heterogeneity of both deployment nodes and available data, the intrinsic decentralized nature of mobile social applications, as well as users' privacy concerns. To validate our approach, we show how we developed two mobile social applications over Yarta, and report on both its efficiency and ease-of use by way of extensive evaluation on smart phones and laptops.

Policy-Based Access Control in Mobile Social Ecosystems

“…CONSTRUCT [11], a middleware architecture providing mobile social application developers with a set of functionalities that allow them to easily create, manage and securely exchange MSE data. The middleware consists of two layers, as shown in Figure 4: the MSE Management Middleware layer, which is responsible for storing, managing and allowing access to MSE data, and the Mobile Middleware layer, which takes care of low level communication/coordination issues.…”

“…In this paper we only focus on components that, by integrating with the Yarta middleware, implement the policy model described above, namely the Knowledge Base and the Policy Manager. More details about the middleware architecture and its components can be found in [11]. Each user's social graph is managed by the Knowledge Base (KB) middleware component.…”

“…We provide a rich representation of MSEs and the interactions possible in them based on the expressive and extensible model defined in [11]. For the sake of clarity we recall in Figure 2 the graph of first-class entities and relationships.…”

“…The adoption of semantic technologies makes the extension of the policy model with new domain data models straightforward, while keeping policy model compatibility intact. Secondly, we have integrated the policy framework as part of Yarta, a middleware for managing mobile users' social ecosystems [11]. Third, we have provided a graphical policy editor to allow nontechnology savvy users to easily specify and manage their access control policies.…”

Towards a Lightweight Mobile Semantic-Based Approach for Enhancing Interaction with Smart Objects

“…Extending this work, it is worth mentioning androJena, a new development (the first version was released on May 2010) based on a subset of the popular Jena framework migrated to Android platforms, that also fulfils these requirements. androJena has been recently used in several works; [9] and [10] can be highlighted as they include performance tests. Although these tests only measure their own particular developments, they can be used to obtain an overall idea of androJena's performance.…”