Social sensors and pervasive services: Approaches and perspectives

Social networks represent a sophisticated tool for accessing the preferences and properties of individuals and groups. Thus, they potentially allow up-to-date, richly annotated contextual data to be acquired as a side effect of users' everyday use of services. In this paper, we explore how such “social sensing” could be integrated into pervasive systems. We frame and survey the possible approaches to such an integration, and discuss the open issues and challenges facing researchers.