Profile management for dynamic groups

Abstract

There is a growing need in supporting social networking for groups who often become isolated, such as elders living at home. In a social network people with similar diseases and ailments can find each other and share information to improve their understanding of their illness. Group communication tools can help maintain a virtual social network and provide a base for information retrieval. Nevertheless, they often lack the strengths of the social networking tools and vice versa. Within this work we have developed a new concept called dynamic groups. Dynamic groups make creation, management, and usage of groups for communication and social networking easy. Nevetheless, for this to work the profile management system is required to handle more than just user information, it is required to provide users with control over their data and offer privacy and customisation capabilities. This article presents HomeCom, a model for profile management in dynamic groups. It also presents the solutions for making queries, as well as the solutions for privacy and customisation using multiple profiles and an integrated rule engine. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.