Engineering Socially-Aware Systems and Applications

Abstract

With the convergence of pervasive mobile computing and social networking, interest has grown significantly in software systems and applications that are aware of users' social context to make pervasive applications more intelligent and accessible. Thus, socially-aware systems have further advanced context-aware systems taking account of human social context such as social relationships to enable the attainment of users' tasks in different domains. However, social context-awareness introduces a variety of software engineering challenges. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a software engineering process that provides a methodological framework for developing various types of socially-aware applications from requirements elicitation through to concrete implementation. We provide context models and software infrastructure to assist developers in rapid prototyping. We also present two case studies to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of our software engineering process by presenting how this process can be used to develop two different types of socially-aware applications utilizing our model and infrastructure. Finally, we evaluate our software engineering approach with respect to a set of software quality metrics.