Title:

Design and Implementation of a Protocol for Feature Negotiation between Platforms with Different Featuresets in the SONIC Online Social Network Federation

Description:

The significance of Online Social Networks as main communication medium grows from year to year. Many different platforms developed in parallel. As part of this thesis a categorization and a taxonomy for Online Social Networks is done and limitations and possible regulations in the field of Online Social Networks will be discussed. Furthermore the concept of interoperability is presented and adopted to the field of the social web. Different Online Social Networks provide mostly the same functionality, but suffer of a lack of interoperability. This leads to a scattered social profile and closed data silos, which does not provide any data exchange or possibility to migrate from one to another platform. To keep in touch with users from different platforms, users have to create and manage multiple accounts and duplicate all their content and social connections. The SONIC protocol is invented to overcome these shortcomings and to provide a seamless communication between different Online Social Networks with the help of open standards and a common core featureset. The object of this thesis is the extension of the SONIC protocol, so that Online Social Networks are able to provide an arbitrary number of feature extensions, inform each other about their supported features and agree on compatible features. Several other protocols, which provide a feature negotiation mechanism, are observed to invent a solution in the field of SONIC. The proposed protocol will be implemented and integrated in the SONIC SDK and evaluated based on performance and scalability aspects.

Supervisor: Sebastian Göndör

Type:  Master Thesis

Duration:  4 months