Ontology-based context synchronization for ad hoc social collaborations

To efficiently support collaborations between people (agents) in real-time, we propose an ontology-based platform for acquainting the most relevant users (e.g., colleagues and classmates), according to their context. Thereby, we modeled two kinds of contexts with semantic information derived from ontologies; (i) personal context, and (ii) consensual context, integrated from several personal contexts. More importantly, we formulate measurement criteria to compare them. Consequently, groups can be dynamically organized with respect to the similarities among several aspects of personal context. In particular, users can engage in complex collaborations related to multiple semantics. For experimentation, we implemented a social browsing system based on context synchronization. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.