A Middleware for Managing and Sharing Geographical Place Definitions Across Social Networking Services

Abstract

This project has been performed as a master thesis and contributes to the UbiCollab project, which is a service-oriented platform for ubiquitous collaboration where social interactions may occur both naturally and unconstrained of situation and location.Social medias have had a rapid growth throughout the last decade.People tend to share everything they do, and where they do it. With the simultaneously growth of mobile applications, application developers integrate social networking services into their application to reach a greater audience. It is easy to integrate one network into their application, but when multiple networks are integrated, the code tends to become more complex. Developers usually choose only one service to keep it simple. This has the disadvantage of making users of different social medias unable to share their geographical location and communicate with each other.During our work with this master, we have created a middleware that is able to share and manage geographical places across social networks, in order to make it easier for developers to make location-based applications for multiple social services.With this implementation we support core features for sharing geographical places in social networks. However, the system needs to support additional features to be treated as a suitable alternative to existing tools.