The SocIoS framework is a software stack that operates on top of Social Networking Sites. SocIoS provides an abstraction layer for aggregating data and functionality from a multitude of underlying social media platforms as well as a set of analytical tools for leveraging that functionality. The SocIoS open source project consists of five software compoents that can be downloaded seperately or together. Each component has its own README file with deailed description and installation instructions where also dependencies with other SocIoS components (if any) are listed. The SocIoS open source project consists of the following components:
The SocIoS API lies at the core of the SocIoS project. It comprises an abstraction layer on top of SNS exposing operations that encapsulate the functionality of the underlying SN APIs. For each supported SN a respective adaptor has been developed. Currently, the component provides support for the following Social Networks: FlickR, DailyMotion, YouTube, MySpace, Google+ and Instagram. Support for additional social networks can be added by implementing the adaptor interface provided.
The SocIoS Event Detection Service aims to enable SocIoS’ clients to detect and monitor real-world events that pertain to a topic of their interest. The service analyses the comments, tweets and other text messages generated by the users of the group and classifies them to categories that are most likely to relate to events. It also generates a set of keywords that define each event so as to assist the end user in understanding the even context.
The SocIoS Sentiment Analysis service aims to analyse Social Media posts to separate subjective from objective (text neutrality) and categorize subjective posts/comments into positive and negative, according to the sentiment of the author (happy/optimistic – sad/pessimistic). The service will count overall positive and negative feedback through comments classification.
The Social Filtering Service aims to tackle the information overload problem by providing new means to find, consume, organize and share social network content. The SFS comprises two sub-components one for dealing with groups and one for filtering activities, the GroupService and the FilteringService respectively. The GroupService implements a persistence layer for storing group membership information. The FilteringService interacts both with the SocIoS core services and with the GroupService for retrieving all activities associated with a given group of persons.
The SocIoS Front-End provides a user interface for interacting with the components as well as an authentication mechanism.
Within the framework of the SocIoS project, in addition to the SocIoS API, we have also developed an alternative approach that is compliant with the OpenSocial specification.The OpenSocial wrappers component provides a framework for extending OpenSocial API access to third-party Social Networks. It is an open source project and can be donwloaded from the following link: