A PhD thesis on the topic “Widgets and Spaces: Personal & Contextual Portability and Plasticity with OpenSocial” was published by Evgeny Bogdanov (thesis directors: Dr D. Gillet, Dr C. Salzmann), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Abstract

Social media platforms are created and exploited for various activities carried out individually or collaboratively and relying on different resources and tools. Social media platforms are inherently contextual; the context being defined as a specific activity carried out for a specific purpose with specific tools and resources, as well as with specific people. These contexts may be spread over different platforms. Thus, users need to collaborate across various platforms, they need to move their environments and data from one platform to another. Every task a person accomplishes has its own specifics. Hence, there is a strong need for users to be able to personalize (shape) their environments to suit their specific needs: by changing a set of tools, adding and removing resources, by adapting the graphical and functional parts of their platforms, and sharing resources with others.

This thesis investigates the challenges of contextualization, portability and personalization within social media platforms. The thesis formally defines the space concept that materializes the user's context and represents an environment constructed by the user. The OpenSocial space extension is proposed to introduce the space concept into the OpenSocial specification and to enable contextual widgets capable of adapting to the user's context. The thesis demonstrates how portability of spaces can be achieved with OpenSocial and provides a classification of various migration methods and scenarios of space portability. The plasticity concept is defined as a measure of a platform ability to be shaped according to users' needs. To address plasticity, the functional skin concept is proposed for personalization of graphical and functional interfaces.

Article by Evgeny Bogdanov (EPFL)