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Special Issue on Foundations of Social Computing: Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management

Published:12 March 2015Publication History
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Abstract

An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world and enable novel socially aware applications. We present Prometheus, a socially aware peer-to-peer service that collects social information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface implementing nontrivial social inferences while complying with user-defined access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time, low communication overhead, and resilience to malicious attacks.

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