SocIoS will pave the way for building qualitative, functional and usable business applications exploiting the User Created Content and the Social Graph of users in Social Networks. By providing tools for cross-platform application development and deployment; support for SLAs and QoS; tools for UCC and social graph management; and most importantly, a usable framework to build services in and through Social Networks, SocIoS will provide incentives for the development of business applications.
Social Networks (SN) are the ideal future service marketplaces. SN users are increasing at a tremendous pace with Web 2.0 and SN Sites (SNS) having attracted more than 500 million regular users within just 5 years of existence. The number of the potential customers is huge, coming from almost every societal class, cultural background, and age. The requirements are: a computer, a browser, network access, and the natural need for socializing. Taking advantage of the social dynamics as well as the vast volumes of amateur content generated every second in a SN is a major step towards creating a potentially huge market of services. Providing developers with cross-platform tools that enable them to manage the dynamically generated content and complex social interactions by allowing them to build, deploy and potentially sell services that combine data and functionality from two or more different SN services disregarding the underlying SN implementation, will create an agile and profitable market of services and will bring the Internet of Services concept a step closer to realization.
SocIoS comes to cover the aspect of service application composition, provision and consumption using SN environments as containers of social graphs and UCC while at the same time supporting the business nature of service provision. Practically, SocIoS will achieve these by implementing:
- A SOA infrastructure that will act as a virtualization layer on top of social networking containers
- A toolset for supporting the business extensions of the developed applications; mainly through SLA support
- An API that will grant end users with single point access to the underlying functionality, including a set of core wrapper services
- A user interface that will simplify the use of the SocIoS API for easier application development and deployment by the home user
- A toolset for third-party services support so they can “blend” with the services developed and deployed using SocIoS, for more effectively delivering applications that exploit the UCC and social graph.