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The Contextual Ego Network P2P Overlay for the Next Generation Social Networks

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Abstract

Internet has completely evolved in recent years, and smart devices, such as mobile and IoT devices have become pervasive in the daily life of people. Internet is becoming more social, and Online Social Networking platforms (OSNs) have become part of the real life of people. Current Online Social Media platforms are centralized. Centralization presents several drawbacks, and during the last years several privacy issues have been arisen concerning the control of private data. Indeed, those platforms offer inadequate guarantees where it concerns the privacy of their users. These problems have been confronted by exploiting decentralized solutions. Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) guarantee more control over private data. Thanks to the definition of a Next Generation Internet focused on people, the need for a new generation of Decentralized Online Social Networks, which puts the user at the center of the system, has been arisen. The HELIOS project tackles this issue by introducing a new decentralized paradigm. In this paper, we present the Contextual Ego Network (CEN), a new P2P Social Overlay built by exploiting the real life of users. We propose a formal definition of the structure, the implementation of the structure in a Java library, and a preliminary analysis in order to evaluate the homophily of each context.

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Notes

  1. https://www.ngi.eu/

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files

  3. https://diasporafoundation.org/

  4. https://mastodon.social/about

  5. http://helios-social.eu/blog/

  6. https://steemit.com/

  7. https://www.sapien.network/

  8. https://www.minds.com/

  9. https://foresting.io/

  10. Available at: https://github.com/DistributedSystemsSocialNetworkAnalysis/Contextual-Ego-Networkhttps://github.com/DistributedSystemsSocialNetworkAnalysis/Contextual-Ego-Network

  11. The dataset is available at the following link: https://snap.stanford.edu/data/egonets-Facebook.html

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the HELIOS H2020 project. HELIOS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825585. K. Kapanova and K. Koidl are also supported by the ADAPT Centre, funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106). We would thanks Giulia Fois for her collaboration in the evaluation section.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi & Laura Ricci

  2. School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Kristina G. Kapanova & Kevin Koidl

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  1. Barbara Guidi
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  2. Kristina G. Kapanova
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  3. Kevin Koidl
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  4. Andrea Michienzi
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  5. Laura Ricci
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Correspondence to Barbara Guidi.

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Guidi, B., Kapanova, K.G., Koidl, K. et al. The Contextual Ego Network P2P Overlay for the Next Generation Social Networks. Mobile Netw Appl 25, 1062–1074 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-020-01525-3

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