Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Key functional building blocks of social computing framework include:
• Federated identity management for uniquely identifying people across
organizational boundaries and geographical boundaries
• Location - based presence detection for discovering who is online or avail-
able and where and to determine primary means to contact
• Interactive multiway communication for real - time interactions for
exchange of ideas and information in a global cross-institutional virtual
space
• Online communities for forming and managing communities of interest
in a global cross-institutional virtual space
• Security and privacy for assurance of confi dentiality and protection of
personal privacy so that a fully trusted virtual space may be established
for the participants
• Context - based defi nition of relationships for describing how the individu-
als are related within a certain context and their roles
• Context - based semantic search and information sharing for fi nding
people and information of interests and for sharing things that are mean-
ingful and relevant to the participants
The fi rst four capabilities have been, more or less, implemented and various
solutions are currently available in the market.
The functional capability to establish a fully trusted virtual space across the
public network infrastructure, the Internet or the cellular network, is a tall
order and has many challenges. This topic is discussed in detail later in this
chapter.
The last point on the above list may be one of the essential building blocks
for the social computing framework and is often referred to as “social search”
capability. Social search is not the traditional search based on key words to
locate information but a context-based semantic search to fi nd people of
interests and relevant information based on semantics such as ontology. Here,
the term “context” spans diverse domains, from geographic locations to social
connections to behavior trajectories.
Google.com became one of the most successful (if not
the
most successful)
Internet service providers in a very short time period due to its innovative
search algorithm and information indexing mechanism. “Google” is used inter-
changeably with the word “search” among the younger generation. They use
phrases like “ Google it ” to fi nd information or “Google shows” for a map or
direction to a certain place. Matt Cutts (www.mattcutts.com/blog/), head of
Google's Webspam Team, asserts that new search tools will provide personal-
ization, a completely new user interface, semantic understanding of queries
and documents, social search for unlocking the power of people, and universal
search for multidimensional and heterogeneous data.
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