Semantics, Sensors, and the Social Web: The Live Social Semantics experiments

The Live Social Semantics is an innovative application that encourages and guides social networking between researchers at conferences and similar events. The application integrates data from the Semantic Web, online social networks, and a face-to-face contact sensing platform. It helps researchers to find like-minded and influential researchers, to identify and meet people in their community of practice, and to capture and later retrace their real-world networking activities. The application was successfully deployed at two international conferences, attracting more than 300 users in total. This paper describes the Live Social Semantics application, with a focus on how data from Web 2.0 sources can be used to automatically generate Profiles of Interest. We evaluate and discuss the results of its two deployments, assessing the accuracy of profiles generated, the willingness to link to external social networking sites, and the feedback given through user questionnaires.