Community context management research and challenges in pervasive and social computing

Context-awareness is one of the main aspects of pervasive computing environments. Recently, some social networking systems have also started to exploit context information. These two paradigms serve different purposes. Pervasive computing systems have been designed mainly to address the needs of individual users, thus neglecting the social nature of humans. On the other hand, social computing focuses on exploiting the social relations between users, on promoting their interactions and on supporting the sharing of digital resources among them. However, the recent development and popularity of social networking systems has happened in isolation from the developments in pervasive computing. This paper elaborates on the role of context in both pervasive and social computing environments and introduces the approach of the SOCIETIES project that integrates full scale pervasive functionality in social networking systems to develop the next generation of social media systems. Finally, it discusses the new research challenges that emerge in pervasive social media regarding community context-awareness and the respective benefits that the end users may experience.