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SmartScribo: A Blogging Application for Smart Spaces
Submitted by Sergey Balandin on 06.02.12
Background and Motivation:
One of the main problems in designing modern Internet services is the enormous size of data pool. A good reference case to evaluate new solutions is blogging. The popularity of blogging increases, many users participate in distributed dynamic discussions on various topics, forming a social network of bloggers - the blogosphere.
There exist many blog clients, either browser-based or non-browser. They exploit the client-server paradigm with read/write messages to a blog at a given blog service. Non-browser clients seem more appropriate for mobile blogging, due to the specific restrictions of mobile devices: small screen, tiny keyboard, non-mouse control, low performance, and intermittent network connectivity. On the other hand, many bloggers are presented in several blogs at multiple blog services, and the same blogger can access many blogs in parallel. The boundaries between different blog services should be seamless and multi-blogging activity replaces pure blogging.
For multi-blogging the client-server paradigm seems inefficient, and another paradigm is needed for constructing distributed multi-blogging applications. We propose to tackle the problem using the smart spaces paradigm and Smart-M3 platform.
Project Summary:
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs on all blog services and of all interconnections between blogs, forming a social network in which every-one can publish messages. A blog-service is a kind of website with the content partitioned onto blogs. A blog consists of several discussions of a given author. Each discussion starts with a post and then follows tree-like structure with comments, comments to comments and so on.
We assume that in blogging the smart spaces applications with personalized, composite and proactive properties will be able to provide efficient and user-friendly solutions for services in the blogosphere. The personalized property allows a user to access a service according to his/her personal interest and current needs. The composite property allows temporal situational composition of semantically related knowledge or services, forming the knowledge relevant at the given moment. The proactive property allows a user to be provided with a service she/he is interested at the given moment of time.
SmartScribo is a blogging application that follows the vision of ubiquitous computing. SmartScribo connects users with their blogs hosted at multiple blog-services We apply smart spaces for a shared structured view in the Blogosphere. Users can introduce new devices into their personal spaces and access dynamic information distributed over many devices. A user can perform the same blogging functions as a non-SmartScribo user and additionally benefits from semantic features, e.g., parallel access to multiple blog services and proactive blog recommendations based on user’s context and activity of other bloggers.
There are three types of SmartScribo agents: blog clients, blog processors, and blog mediators. Clients operate with blogs locally and send notifications to the blogosphere smart space for operations at blog-services. Blog processors track notifications from clients relaying particular blog-services. Mediators extend blogging with smart features (e.g., blog rankings).
The project develops solutions to provide Smart-M3 applications with personalized, composite and proactive properties. We apply and evaluate the solutions in SmartScribo. The implementation is available for free download and use (http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartscribo/). The approach can be transferred to other smart spaces applications.
We consider two cases for demo use:
- SmartScribo as an independent service for blogging. It includes two parts. (A) development and deployment of infrastructural components: Smart-M3 SIB(s), blog processors and blog mediators. (B) development of blog clients (for various mobile platforms) and their dissemination with the bloggers community for public testing and use.
- SmartScribo as a blogging service that allows integration into external applications. The case study is provision of blogging in the Smart Conference System for discussions among conference participants. The demo illustrates how one application can benefit from knowledge produced by another application
Project goals and future research directions:
<p class="\"rtejustify\"">SmartScribo is currently on development iteration III (Jan 2012 - July 2012). Its overall aim is implementing a prototype multi-blog system where the proactive and personalized properties are central for services. The project follows in parallel the research directions.</p>
<ol>
<li class="\"rtejustify\"">Methods for smart space composition: building personal spaces as a part of the application smart space and interactions between several smart spaces for synchronization within the application. It is a formal computational base model for service proactivity and personalization (as well as for integration with external applications). It also supports the application with the means to work only with a fraction of huge data.</li>
<li class="\"rtejustify\"">Blog mediators: knowledge inference for ranking blogs, blog recommendations and blog aggregations based on personal context information. It is architectural and algorithmic base for introducing proactivity and personalization into blogging.</li>
<li class="\"rtejustify\"">Platform enhancements: blog client for mobile Windows-based devices, blog processors for various blog services. Feasibility study of messaging support from popular social networks like Facebook. Integration of SmartScribo in the Smart Conference System.</li>
</ol>
List of team members and their organizations:
Dmitry Korzun, Dr/Adjunct Professor, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Diana V. Zaiceva, MSc student, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Ivan V. Galov, MSc student, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Rustam I. Kadirov, student, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Andrey S. Vdovenko, student, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Stepan S. Polyakov, student, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Status:
Graduate
Project Timeline and Expected Deliverables:
January-February 2012: Theoretical study with prototyping for simple experiments. Development of formal models for space-based blogging. Report and initial demos. Integrations to Smart Conference.
March-April 2012: Implementation of basic functions for both demos. Deployment of the SmartScribo infrastructure. Drafts for research papers.
May-July 2012: Release of the application. User guide, summary report and papers.
Now the project activity is moved to PetrSU SmartRoom project where SmartScribo is used for participant discussions.
Final deadline:
Wednesday, August 1, 2012 (All day)
