SOCIETIES: Where Pervasive Meets Social

Traditionally, pervasive systems are designed with a focus on the individual, offering services that take advantage of their physical environment and provide a context-aware, personalised user experience. On the other hand, social computing is centred around the notion of a community, leveraging the information about the users and their social relationships, connecting them together often using different criteria that can range from a user's physical location and activity to personal interests and past experiences. The SOCIETIES Integrated Project attempts to bridge these different technologies in a unified platform allowing individuals to utilise pervasive services in a community sphere. SOCIETIES aims to use community driven context awareness, preference learning and privacy protection for intelligently connecting people, communities and things. Thus, the goal of SOCIETIES is to radically improve the utility of Future Internet services by combining the benefits of pervasive systems with these of social computing. This paper provides an overview of the vision, concepts, methodology, architecture and initial evaluation results towards the accomplishment of this goal.