Connective experience: Co-creating a semantic enabled serendipity service for living labs and Internet of Things

While this paper reports about an investigation on the degree to which autonomously generated connections among people are relevant, it rewinds the 7 years of undertaken exploration and experimentation on the People-Concepts Networking (PCN) approach for creating a new kind of connective technology that is not based on explicit links but rather on computing the correlation among a group of users' concepts from which emerge intangible links. The first stage of the PCN development was devoted to the design of an ontology model and to assemble the necessarily technology components for crawling, parsing, indexing, extracting and clustering concepts as well as interfacing with external applications for accessing users' content-objects. It has resulted into an embryonic form of a semantic based connective technology platform supporting the emergence of knowledge connection opportunities among users. The second stage happened at the crossroads of Living Labs (LL) and the creation of Internet of Things (IoT) based services that have extended PCN into People-Concepts-Things Networking. The goal was to study the capacity to connect with and re-use previous knowledge gained during IoT based service experiments within LLs in order to enhance the connective experience of users; hence increase the potential rate of adoption by user communities. Finally, the results of the surveys and experimentation are presented as well as a set of preliminary conclusions and perspectives on future work.