The aim of pervasive system technology is to
support the user in managing and interacting with devices in the
environment around him/her. By contrast social networking
systems are aimed at supporting communication and interactions
between people. The major objective of the SOCIETIES project
is to unite these two technologies in a seamless manner to create a
platform that enables the user to interact with both devices and
people in an integrated way. Such a platform, referred to as a
Pervasive Social Networking System, needs to integrate the
pervasive computing technologies from the user’s physical spaces
with social computing technologies in the user’s digital spaces.
An important aspect of the SOCIETIES platform is its ability to
adapt its behaviour to meet the individual needs and preferences
of the user. This paper focuses on some key aspects of the design
of the personalization subsystem of the platform: the extraction
of personalization information from digital and physical spaces,
the use of this to adapt these spaces autonomously and the
extension to include community information to provide
additional benefit to the user. Development of the basic platform
together with a set of third party services running on it is
complete and the system is currently being evaluated in a real
user trial by a group of University students.