Challenges for Mobile Social Networking Applications

This paper presents work in progress regarding utilization of social network information for mobile applications. Primarily a number of challenges are identified, such as how to mine data from multiple social networks, how to integrate and consolidate social networks, and how to manage semantic information for mobile applications. The challenges are discussed from a semantic Web perspective using a driving scenario as motivation. The main objective is to enable mobile applications to benefit from semantic information obtained from Web services, mobile devices, or the surrounding environment. The goal is therefore to create a framework that enables integration of semantic information (location, activity, interests, etc) with social network data (from Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc) to facilitate intelligent yet easy to use communication tools for individual persons as well as groups of persons. An ultimate goal is to make complex communication simple through utilization of semantic information and social network data for pervasive services in mobile devices.