Ubiquitous Semantics: How to Create and Navigate a Personal Semantic Network

Abstract

Pervasive computing systems including smart phones, home computing systems, or intelligent home appliances collect and store more and more information about users. The amount of information that is constantly being accumulated for each user is enormous. Collected information comprises the user's digital data like messages, online social network connections, or tweets and the user's physical context data like user location, physical proximity to other people, or physical activities. Increasingly powerful content analysis and physical context inference technologies enable the extraction of relationships among places, people, and events, and use the resulting context to construct a personal semantic network (PSN) of the contextual relationships across one's digital and physical interactions. Entities representing locations, people, events, activities etc. serve as pivotal elements empowering the user to navigate their PSN. This paper will discuss and detail both the construction and navigation of a PSN integrating a user's physical and digital content.