A Service-oriented Mobile Social Networking Platform for Disaster Situations

This paper proposes a novel service-oriented mobile social networking platform called MS2A for disaster situations. MS2A consists of two layers: service layer and application layer. The service layer is implemented based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) to ease application developments. By extending and composing the web services at this layer, application developers can efficiently and flexibly develop different new functions or applications for mobile disaster rescue and recovery applications. The application layer is oriented to mobile users and it integrates with functions of mobile social networks. With dynamic and automatic service collaboration support, it enables people to easily collaborate and help each other through their mobile devices in disaster situations. The results of our experiments and demonstration examples given in the paper show the feasibility and desired functionality of MS2A for relieving disaster situations with mobile devices.