Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.
(2014) 4:158
DOI 10.1007/s13278-014-0158-8
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A spontaneous social network based on mobile devices
Cristiano Andre da Costa Dante Zaupa Jorge Luis Victoria Barbosa
Rodrigo da Rosa Righi Joao de Camargo Nikolas Daroit
Adenauer Correa Yamin
Received: 5 May 2013 / Revised: 3 September 2013 / Accepted: 5 November 2013 / Published online: 13 February 2014
 Springer-Verlag Wien 2014
Abstract Social networks provide a growing mean of
communication that still preserves our human social
interaction. Due to the widespread use of mobile devices,
and the vast development of applications targeting these
platforms, people tend to use their smartphone or tablet as
the main way to make that interaction. Furthermore,
applications developed to these devices are fostering the
use of contextual information, such as the location of the
user. In this way, this article describes a model for a
spontaneous social network targeted at mobile devices. In
our proposal, named Mingle, the social network is spon-
taneous, i.e., involves only people who are physically
present in a specific location. Besides presenting the model,
we show a developed prototype using Android-based
devices. We evaluated Mingle employing two strategies.
C. A. da Costa (&)
D. Zaupa
J. L. V. Barbosa

R. R. Righi
J. de Camargo
N. Daroit
Applied Computing Graduate Program (PIPCA), University
of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), Sao Leopoldo, Brazil
e-mail: cac@unisinos.br
D. Zaupa
e-mail: dante.zaupa@gmail.com
J. L. V. Barbosa
e-mail: jbarbosa@unisinos.br
R. R. Righi
e-mail: rrrighi@unisinos.br
J. de Camargo
e-mail: jvdecamargo@gmail.com
N. Daroit
e-mail: nikolastnd@gmail.com
A. C. Yamin
Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPGC), Federal
University of Pelotas (UFPEL), Pelotas, Brazil
e-mail: adenauer@inf.ufpel.edu.br
The first evaluation consisted of a performance evaluation
of the server. The second assessment focused on usability,
regarding effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of users
in using Mingle. The results were encouraging and show
the potential of deploying Mingle in real situations.
Keywords Social networks
Spontaneity
Mobile
computing
Context awareness
Ubiquitous computing
1 Introduction
Wireless network provides ubiquitous Internet access in
urban areas and together with improvements in mobile
devices interfaces, allow a daily seamless integrated
experience. The next step, already available in some
applications, is the perception of user and environment
attributes, such as physical location, emotional state and
personal history. This perception has been called context
awareness (Bellavista et al. 2012).
The widespread use of mobile devices, with a variety of
context-aware applications (Apps), fosters the development
of software that provides a spontaneous interaction:
everywhere, every time and related to users interests and
their location. This last characteristic brings what has been
named Location Based Services (LBS), which considers
not only user position, but also a set of contextual services
related to that specific location (Vaughan-Nichols 2009).
To stimulate that interaction, we can make use of social
networks.
Differently of many social networks available today,
this article proposes the development of a spontaneous
social network (Huang et al. 2012). People physically
present in a specific place form the social network, which is
named Mingle. Users access Mingle via their mobile
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devices, through an App specifically developed for this
interaction.
Besides providing virtual spaces and motivating self-
expression, online social networks have been altering our
communication style, although typically preserving the
same principles of human social interaction (Kleinberg
2008). In this work we tackled a different approach, con-
sidering the premise that it is natural, and because of that
near to the concept of ubiquitous computing (Weiser 1999;
Costa et al. 2008), to enable the interaction of people based
on their location. In this way, Mingle offers contextualized
services to people present in specific places. Although the
interacting users change according to the locality, the user
profile is preserved among different places. This is because
a typical user profile contains valuable information
regarding a user that helps establishing friendship and
connects users that share common interests (Bhattacharyya
et al. 2011).
The main motivation behind Mingle is to provide a set
of virtual services, on top of physical facilities, available in
specific locations. To access those services, users will use
an App in their mobile devices, which congregates all these
features. Differently from many online social networks,
Mingle proposes a contextual set of services and contents,
along with the possibility of interacting with people present
at that specific time and location. We believe that this is a
novel approach, i.e., one that uses a physical location as the
relation among individuals, which can virtually extend the
conveniences of places and foster the interaction among
people who are physically present. Another benefit of
Mingle is that every user can provide services and contents
to people in that specific location. Nonetheless, Mingle
allows that in some places (called Private Cells) a central
authority may impose some restrictions, controlling or
profiting from the features offered by users.
In this article we describe Mingle, which aims at man-
aging ubiquitous interaction with minimum infrastructure.
The main expected result is the development of a func-
tional system that allows interaction among users and that
could be applied in assorted scenarios, involving com-
mercial or purely social connections.
Two previous articles showed initial assessments of our
proposal, one focusing on evaluating the ontology (Silva
et al. 2011), and another presenting an initial evaluation of
the developed prototype, based on scenarios and also of the
server (Zaupa et al. 2012). In this paper, we further
implemented the mobile client, based on Android, and the
server that manages interactions in specific places. We then
conducted two evaluations. One based on the performance
evaluation of the server, as in Zhang and Adipat (2005),
and other focused on usability, assessing the effectiveness,
efficiency and satisfaction of users in using Mingle.
We believe that the main contributions of this work are:
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Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
To provide a proposal of a spontaneous social network,
with a model and a feasible implementation;
To propose an ontology for Mingle that can be a basis
for generalizing the model in adaptable contexts;
To evaluate the proposal in terms of performance,
stressing the system with a large number of queries;
To assess the proposal in terms of usability, conducting
a field study with real users.
The article is organized into nine sections. Section 2
presents background concepts, covering the main ideas
employed in Mingle. The model proposed for Mingle is
presented in Sect. 3. Section 4 explains the ontology pro-
posed for representing information in Mingle. The imple-
mentation details are described in Sect. 5. Subsequently, in
Sect. 6, we present some application scenarios to illustrate
Mingle use in real environments. Section 7 shows both
evaluations conducted, regarding server performance and
usability. Related works were discussed in Sect. 8. Finally,
in Sect. 9, we present some final remarks and directions of
future work.
2 Background
Mingle is a large project, and, as such, it makes use of
concepts from more than one area. Specifically, we are at
the convergence of ubiquitous computing, social networks
and ontologies.
2.1 Ubiquitous computing
Ubiquitous computing is the idea that computers became so
ingrained in day-to-day life that they become indissociable
from it, embedded in the background and virtually invisible
(Weiser 1999). This invisibility means that, rather then
being the focus of the user experience, the computer
becomes anything that enables it. Therefore, a service
designed with ubiquitous computing can be used from
diverse devices, such as smartphones, notebooks and
netbooks.
2.2 Social networks
An online social network is a structure that enables the
interaction and sharing of ideas and information within a
group of persons, who share common interests and goals
(Tian and Samaan 2013). The network models relation
among the individuals, the most common being acquain-
tanceship, although other patterns can also be represented
(Newman 2003). Social networks became very popular
along with the dissemination of the Internet, where the
focus was mostly on the lists of acquaintances. Moreover,
Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
the current high availability of smartphones and tablets
gave social networks a great boost in popularity, leading to
the creation of Mobile Social Network (MSN). MSNs are
defined as spontaneous social communities, which can be
formed by users that interact at any place or time, without
the need of any pre-existing relation among them (Tian and
Samaan 2013). This idea of spontaneity opens new possi-
bilities of employing assorted contexts as the basis for
creating a social network, such as, for example, location, as
used in Mingle.
2.3 Ontologies
Ontology is a concept network, and it models knowledge in
a way that allows the computer to make logical inferences
based on data. Ontologies can express the representation of
a concept (Gruber 1993), and also organize and classify
definitions (Peng and Sikun 2009). They can be applied to
the structure information of a social network, leading to the
concept of Semantic Social Network (Cucchiarelli et al.
2012).
3 Mingle model
The Mingle is a different kind of social network. Most
approaches, such as Facebook and Twitter, are based on the
idea of a network of known people. Differently, in Mingle,
the social network is based upon location. People who are
physically in the same cell of a user form their contacts.
That is, the central proposal of Mingle is to use as the
integrator element of a social network the physical location
of users. People present in a specific place, called cell in
Mingle, become engaged in a spontaneous social network,
which was created specifically in that place and integrating
only the people there present. As people come and go,
users of a cell in Mingle vary accordingly.
Mingle users can access a group of virtual services and
contents related to the specific place where they are loca-
ted. Furthermore, users in a cell can interact with each
other. The main way to access the social network is via the
users smartphone. There are other ways of interacting with
Mingle, either using another mobile device (such as a
tablet) or even using a stationary device, such as a touch-
screen TV.
Each cell has a base node that offers services and con-
tents, which are fully accessible to identified users. How-
ever, people can use Mingle without disclosing their
identity to others, though that removes access to certain
features. Later, if so chosen, they can disclose their loca-
tion and/or identity and enjoy contact with users and ser-
vices offered in Mingle. Moreover, Mingle users can also
offer services and contents that will be available only in the
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Fig. 1 Example of a private Mingle cell for a Mall
scope of the cell they are in. The offering of services and
content generated by users is considered today a factor that
fosters the mobile computing widespread (Jensen et al.
2008).
People create their profile defining user information. In
addition, users configure their personal preferences and
interests, and link content and services provided to it. That
information is stored in an ontology, that is used to create
knowledge based with information regarding users and
cells. The ontology is also used to infer information that
promotes interaction among users.
In Mingle, context awareness is a key characteristic to
transform relation among people in ubiquitous interaction.
Besides physical location and personal profile, other con-
texts are considered in Mingle, such as time, social per-
spective, history and environmental conditions.
There are two types of Mingle cells. Public Cells are
those that allow any kind of interaction among users, not
controlling or intermediating users, services and contents.
On the other hand, Private Cells control the interaction
among people. With this, we can control the type of ser-
vices and contents that are offered by users and manage
that operation. For instance, in private cells we can
authorize and even charge a commission in services com-
mercialized by users.
Figure 1 presents an example of a Mingle private cell in
a Mall. The figure shows users connected to the cell using
their devices. Inside the cell, we can see some questions
that Mingle could help to answer. The answer for the two
last questions can vary, according to people who are
present in the cell and the set of virtual services offered at
that instant. Although the first two questions seem to be of
a more static nature, Mingle can consider context infor-
mation, such as users profile, their needs or location, to
recommend more suitable stores. This scenario is further
explored in Sect. 6.
Regarding security and privacy, when users engage in a
cell, they do not have to disclose their identity or any
information on their profile. As users need to use services
or interact with other people, they can choose which
information they want to disclosure, for instance some
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Fig. 2 Mingle architecture showing the main components and also
the typical workflow
personal data or their specific location. The idea is to
preserve users identities and let them choose whether or
what they want to share in each situation. One possibility is
to provide an access control policy, in which users can
allow or deny access to their contents, such as that pro-
posed by Shehab et al. (2013).
A trust management can be used to establish the trust in
the relationship among people to the exchange of infor-
mation and resources access. The difficulty lies in precisely
defining the trustworthiness of an interacting entity and
grant permissions based on that decision. In some cases,
there is little or even no evidence available about an entity
and, as in our daily trust decisions; it is more of a sub-
jective notion. Apart from being subjective, trust has other
characteristics (Costa et al. 2008): non-symmetry (two
interacting components can have different trust in each
other), situation-specific (dependent of context), dynamic
(increase or decrease in time), and it is inherently associ-
ated with risk (no reason to trust if there is no risk
involved). Because of these, we plan to provide a trust
reasoning support in the future. This reasoning analysis
could be made based on available information and con-
sidering the various aspects of trust. We plan to explore
this as a future work.
Figure 2 presents Mingle architecture along with the
typical workflow. A client connects to the server and sends a
script containing a set of operations, typically a query or a
modification in the knowledge base. Mingle server instan-
tiates a manager, which can be located in a different machine
for scalability purposes, to process that script. After pro-
cessing a query (or an inference), the manager then returns a
new script with the answer to the client.
Mingle workflow, presented in Fig. 2, has ten steps. The
process starts when a client asks for a connection in a
Mingle cell (Step 1). When this request is approved (Step
2), client sends a script, in the JSON format, created
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Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
automatically from the user requests. This script describes
the set of data available to the user and the filtering oper-
ations over that set (Step 3).
The filtering process occurs in the server and has double
purpose: preserves client resources, typically a mobile
device, and reduces the size of the data transmitted over the
network, since the set could be considerably big. After
receiving a script, a Gateway instantiates a new Mingle-
ManagerManager (Step 4), which can select the suitable
manager to process the script (Steps 5 and 6). The manager
is typically a class that implements an interface Mingle-
Manager. This manager interprets the operations in the
script and executes the queries or modifications in the
knowledge base (Steps 7, 8 and 9).
The received data are then stored in a new file, also in
JSON format, which is sent back to the client (Step 10).
4 Mingle ontology
One of the principles of the Mingle Model is that it must be
able to, based on the data stored from users, make infer-
ences and feed a recommendation system. In this section,
we will describe the Mingle ontology (Silva et al. 2011).
The scope of the ontology is to describe the entities that
will be involved in a spontaneous social network in general,
and specifically in Mingle. This scope was defined using a
list of competency questions, that is, issues and subjects that
the Knowledge Base built from the ontology must answer.
From this list, existing compatible ontologies were resear-
ched for use in Mingle. Although the reuse of ontologies is
an important aspect in this process, there is a lack of public
ontologies libraries (DAquin and Noy 2012). The ontolo-
gies used in Mingle are Friend-of-a-FriedFOAF (Brick-
ley and Miller 2008), the Finance1 and the Foundation for
Intelligence Physical Agents (FIPA) Device.2
After defining the scope, the next step was to list
important terms for the proposed ontology. First, we chose
terms related to social networks, and then listed important
to Mingle (for example, Device and Content). Next, those
terms were organized as a hierarchy of classes as the
Mingle ontology. The ontology is presented in Fig. 3.
The ontology proposed for the Mingle server is formed
mainly by the following classes:
Person: represents the users of the cellthe main actors
inside this spontaneous social network;
Cell: denotes the concept of a cell in the Mingle
servera specific area, not necessarily with physical
boundaries;
1
http://www.fadyart.com/ontologies/data/Finance.owl.
2
http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00091/SI00091E.html.
Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
Fig. 3 Mingle ontology
Site: acts like subcells inside a bigger onerepresents
specific places that a cell can have, such as stores inside
a mall;
Service: represents any activity that can be offered by
sites or persons;
Content: characterizes contents that can be offered by
sites and persons within the cell;
Location: denotes the geographical position of a person
inside a cell;
Device: symbolizes a device on the cell and can be
bound to a person.
5 Implementation
We developed a prototype of Mingle consisting of a server
and an Android client. The server was developed using
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Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and using the application
server JBoss. To allow clients to find the server, we
employed Avahi, a multicast DNS mechanism, to discover
cells and services. Each Mingle cell advertises itself as an
Avahi service, which is read by the Android client and used
to select to which cell each user wants to connect. The
ontology was modeled on Protege, is stored in OWL, and is
accessed using the Jena library. The base was persisted
using PostgreSQL. Finally, to interpret JSON files we
employed the open source library Jackson.
Part of the Mingle software architecture can be inferred
from the Mingle Model section. The most important aspect
of the architecture is its modularity. Every action that is
possible through the system runs to MingleGateway, that
sends them to MingleManagerManager, which instantiates
a new thread with one of the Mingle Managers.
The Mingle Managers are in charge of data access, read
and write, and there is one for every menu item in the client
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Fig. 4 Screenshots of the usage scenario evaluation: a choosing a cell, b available options, c addition of service, d list of available services
(see Fig. 4). Those managers use methods from a MingleDB
class, which separates implementation from persistence.
The MingleDB class implements all the standard CRUD
(Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) methods for every
table, and all data access happens through the retrieval of
the whole database, which is filtered in the application, not
by the persistence. To do so, there is a Data class, which
acts as a table for generic data, and that also provides
filtering methods. The filtering operations are executed
within the manager, according to a JSON script sent by the
client, and in the end, if needed, the resulting data table is
converted to JSON format and sent to the client.
6 Application scenarios
Since we have modeled and implemented Mingle, we plan to
use it in real applications. To clarify Mingle potential, we
describe some possible application scenarios. We think that
people would use Mingle because it congregates in only one
App much information related to a specific location. These
include people present, a set of virtual services and dynamic
contents. Without Mingle, information would be scattered
through different social networks, apps, web pages and other
assorted resources. With Mingle, a virtual layer is provided,
which delivers a dynamic set of services and contents related
to users physical location. The following scenarios show
some services and contests that could be easily found by
users, or provided by the same users, if Mingle was available.
6.1 Shopping mall
As presented before, a shopping mall is an example of a
private cell. When persons enter in a Mall, they can
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Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
connect to the spontaneous social network using their
mobile device. Using the Mingle App, people can access
specific contents (for instance maps, product offers and
services, menus, etc.,) and services (for example, find
products, find a specific store, compare prices, etc.,).
People presented in a mall can offer many virtual services
and contents:
Image consultant: Service that can be offered
remotely to help clients in choosing which products
to buy. An user can send his/her profile, history of
past boughs and pictures of clothes that he/she is
interested in buying. The consultant can return
suggestions of cloths, matching pieces, opportunities
(considering sales), considering her personal taste and
current trends;
Translation service: A person from abroad is visiting
the mall and he does not know how to speak the local
language. A service could be available, in which,
simultaneous translation is made for every phrase he
says. When the user wants to translate something, he
clicks the microphone button in his earpiece, and the
smartphone captures the sound, sends to a translator
and the same sentence in the current language is
returned. A small fee can be charged for each sentence
translated;
Personalized music: A musician could make available
in a mall his/her compositions. Anyone can freely listen
to that music locally. The music could be automatically
selected according to the peoples profile and current
mood. The listener could buy the currently playing tune
to add it to his/her personal collection. This transaction
is intermediated by the mall, which gets a fee in every
transaction.
Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
6.2 Public park
A park in a city could be an example of a place for a public
cell of Mingle. Many contents could be offered in a park,
such as routes, maps, distances, etc. People physically
present in the park could interact in various ways; for
instance, to exercise together or to practice team sports.
Many virtual services could be offered by people present in
the park, such as:
Personal training: A physical educator can offer her
services in the park. A person who wants to do some
gym, can send his profile and receive a set of tailored
exercises that are viable to practice in that area. The
smartphone of the client could monitor some vital
signs and send periodically this information to the
trainer;
Digital caricature: An artist in a park could offer a
service of virtual caricature. Someone who wants a
caricature, takes a picture of himself/herself using his/
her smartphone and sends to the artist. Then, the artist
draws in his computer the caricature and sends back
when it is done;
Discovery nature: A biologist can offer a service of a
virtual walking tour in the park. In this tour, she can
describe the fauna and flora of the surrounding, only by
knowing the current position of her client. She can offer
personal tours and also group tours.
6.3 University campus
A Mingle cell could be available in a university to provide
content and services to students and staff. As example of
possible contents, we can access the campus map,
description of facilities, etc. Consider the following virtual
services that could be created by the community in the
campus:
Study groups: A service can be created for organizing
study groups. The service could match people with
common interests. A person can send his profile and
current courses. In this way, this service can suggest
other students with common interests, complementary
knowledge or skills;
Book selling: A service could be created so that people
can sell books that they do not want anymore or buy
used books for better prices. The service could provide
an online auction targeting at book sales and trades;
Find People: A service to find a specific professor or
student in the campus. People who register in the
system could disclose their location. In this way, others
can easily find their location and, if available, associ-
ated activity.
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7 Evaluation
We conducted various evaluations with the developed
prototype. Previously, we had evaluated the ontology. This
assessment was detailed in (Silva et al. 2011). The model,
including a former version of the Android client, was first
assessed through a usage scenario. This evaluation was
detailed in other previous article (Zaupa et al. 2012).
In this article, we focus on two major assessments. The
first set of tests regards server performance. In this case we
concentrate on scalability issues, assessing the supported
workload. The second groups of test were related to
usability evaluation, focusing on quantitative and qualita-
tive attributes. The aim of this last assessment is to evaluate
effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.
7.1 Evaluation of server performance
To evaluate Mingle server, we created a Virtual Machine
(VM) using Oracle VirtualBox. This VM had a 2.93 GHz
Intel Core 2 Duo processor, with 1,296 MB of RAM in the
host system and was interconnected using a virtual Ether-
net configured in bridge mode, i.e., as an independent
machine in the network. In this VM, we had instantiated a
Mingle server representing the Mingle_Local_Test cell.
We used Gnome System Monitor to generate graphics
representing CPU load (in percentage of the total capacity)
and network traffic (in KB/s) for the server created. All the
measurements were repeated ten times and the graphs
present the average. The standard deviation was not sig-
nificant in all tests. Each one of the tests was monitored for
60 s.
Figure 5 graphs show the CPU load and network traffic
of the test machine before executing Mingle server. Ana-
lyzing the data, we observe that the system overload is
around 40 %, considering only the operational system
execution and VirtualBox itself. At first glance, this over-
load could be considered high, but it is due to the amount
of total RAM installed in the system and also the execution
of VirtualBox on top of the operating system. Furthermore,
there is a network traffic oscillating between 0 and 3 kb/s.
These values represent normal IO operations of the oper-
ating system, and represent less than 1 % of a 100 Mb/s
network.
Figure 6 presents the VM with the server loaded, which
is waiting for a connection during 50 s. The figure shows
that there is a small interval of high CPU load in the
execution instant, but after that system returns to the same
processing level of the former state. During 10 s (between
time 50 and 40) the CPU load supersedes 50 %, with the
topmost load of 63 %.
Figure 7 shows the server writing 200 lines of data in a
table of the knowledge base. When finished, Mingle
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Fig. 5 Graphics showing the

CPU load and network traffic of
the test machine before
executing Mingle server

Fig. 6 Graphics showing the

CPU load and network traffic of
the test machine waiting for a
connection. The server was
loaded instantly in 50 s

Fig. 7 Graphics showing the

CPU load and network traffic of
the test machine writing 200
lines of data, followed by a read
operation and by sending data to
the client. The process starts at
the mark of 40 s

removes data from the table, stores in a temporary data
structure in RAM, and sends to the client. The network
graph shows that the operation did not overload the virtual
machine. In terms of CPU use, during 5 s we had a tem-
porary load of 100 %, which was when the table was being
created in RAM. Despite that interval, the CPU load was
stable and in the range we obtained in the previous graphs
(around 40 %).
Finally, Fig. 8 presents the server processing a request
of 5,000 writing operations in a table of the knowledge
base. Initially, this table was empty. After executing the
writting operations, the server read the same data and store
it in a temporary data structure in RAM. After that, data is
sent to the client. There were no big impact of this oper-
ation in the network, but in terms of CPU load again we
observed an intense usage during the build of the table in
RAM. This process occurred during 10 s, having the CPU
load oscillating between 85 and 100 %. Excepting this
range, the CPU usage was around 40 %, the same value
measured before executing Mingle.
The experiments carried out show that a machine with
low processing power, even with influence of great load,
could fulfill Mingle needs. Although we encounter some
overload intervals, during which the CPU load usage was
100 %, we can ponder that we employed a limited hard-
ware configuration in the experiments. The graphs also

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Fig. 8 Graphics showing the

CPU load and network traffic of
the test machine processing a
script with 5,000 lines of data,
followed by a read operation
and by sending data to the
client. The process starts at the
mark of 40 s

demonstrate that the impact in the network is not signifi- Table 1 Tasks proposed for usability evaluation
cant. In our experiments, the total network traffic did not Task #1 Create a user, login in the system and access a cell
exceed 4 KB/s in any test. This shows that for the Task #2 Discover the available services in the current cell
employed load, varying from 200 to 5,000 operations, the
Task #3 Create a new service in the cell
system scaled well in terms of network traffic, but could
Task #4 Visualize and edit the user profile
present a bottleneck in terms of CPU load considering the
hardware used.
We considered that the results are encouraging and
signalize that hardware with greater processing capability
and available RAM could fulfill the need of a great number
of clients.

7.2 Usability evaluation

Since the development of mobile computing, and particu-

larly the advent of mobile software, usability evaluation
has been employed in the assessment of mobile applica-
tions (Biel et al. 2010; Rusu et al. 2011; Zhang and Adipat
2005). According to ISO 9241-11, usability is defined as
the extent to which a product can be used by specified
users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, effi-
ciency and satisfaction in a specified context of use
(International Standard Organization, 1998). Following this
concept, we employed the framework proposed by Zhang
and Adipat (2005) to evaluate the three most important
usability attributes (according to ISO 9241-11 definition):
Effectiveness: the comparison of user performance with
a predefined level;
Efficiency: the time that user needs to complete a task;
Satisfaction: the attitude of users toward applications
after using them.
We defined the following protocol for evaluation, based
in Kenteris et al. (2009). We carried out a field study using
actual mobile devices to measure the three attributes:
effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. We defined a set
of four tasks (showed in Table 1) that were assigned to a
group of ten users. First, we explained what was the pur-
pose of the application and gave a general tour of the main
features. Then we asked the users to complete the four
Fig. 9 Effectiveness of users in completing tasks
tasks proposed twice. We timed the execution of each task,
and also kept a record of completed ones. Finally, we asked
the users to answer a survey.
The results of the first quantitative test are summarized
in Fig. 9. The graph shows the effectiveness (in percent)
for completing each task. In fact, all ten users could
complete all four tasks proposed. This result indicates that
Mingle was very effective, because users could complete
the four tasks proposed twice.
The second graph (Fig. 10) shows the average effi-
ciency, also in percent. Each column consists of the aver-
age time needed for users to complete each task twice,
compared to a gold standard. Analyzing the results, we can
observe that all users got efficiency times above 80 %,
which seams a good result.
The second task had the lowest efficiency. This is
because that task had the greater standard deviation (of
44 %). If we analyze more closely the numbers, we will see
that this percentage is not at all unsatisfactory, since the

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and also the learnability. In Table 2, the average efficiency

is shown in the format hours:minutes:seconds. We
obtained an average learnability of 71.7 %, meaning that,
in average, the second time the users executed the four
tasks they had a gain of time of 28.3 %.
To evaluate the qualitative attribute, satisfaction, we
applied a survey to users, after completing the proposed
tasks. This evaluation followed the Technology Accep-
tance Model (TAM) proposed by Davis (1989) and
extended by Yoon and Kim (2007), using a Likert scale
(1932). According to Davis (1989), studies show that
among the various factors that people consider more
Fig. 10 Average efficiency of users in completing tasks twice important to accept or reject an application, the perception
of utility, i.e., the degree that the user evaluates the
Table 2 Learnability of users in completing tasks application can improve their experience, is the most
important variable to consider. The second most important
Task Average efficiency Average efficiency Learnability
1st time 2nd time (%) variable is called Ease of Use, which is defined as the
degree to which a person believes that the use of a system
Task #1 00:01:18 00:00:51 65.3 is free from stress. This variable complements the first,
Task #2 00:00:05 00:00:04 79.6 because according to researches just the application is not
Task #3 00:00:44 00:00:30 86.3 enough to be useful, because the benefits of applying must
Task #4 00:00:17 00:00:13 75.2 overcome its effort to use (Yoon and Kim 2007).
For each factor proposed by the TAM methodology, we
gold standard for completing this task is approximately 4 s, defined five statements to which the user could choose
and the standard deviation is approximately 2 s, which among five different scales (strong disagree, partially dis-
seems quite a small time in a user usage perspective. agree, indifferent, partially agree and strongly agree). We
In the case of the first task, the gold standard for doing it also leave an open question for general comments and
is approximately 55 s. In this case, the standard deviation suggestions.
was 20.6 %, about 16 s. Since this task involves the crea- The assessment of Ease of Use is detailed in Table 3 and
tion of a user, it in fact has quite different times, depending summarized in Fig. 11. The results show that our model
on variables such as user typing speed and even the number had a good acceptance among users. Nobody chose the
of characters used for the login name. disagree options. Besides, 70 % of users strongly agreed
In the other two tasks, the standard deviation was not with the proposed statements. We obtained a better result
significant. The Task #3 had a gold standard of 30 s, and in statement four, regarding the effort needed to add a
Task #4 of 12 s. Both obtained, respectively, 94.5 and service.
99 % of average efficiency. The worst result was in statement 2, regarding Ease of
Since we asked for users to execute twice each task, we Use. We attributed that for the lack of familiarity of some
also tried to measure learnability, i.e., which was the gain users with Android. In general, 70 % of the users strongly
in terms of time elapsed comparing the mean time for agree with all statements regarding Ease of Use.
executing each task for the first and second time. The The evaluation regarding Perception of Utility is pre-
results were summarized in Table 2. The table shows the sented in Table 4, and a graph summarizing the general
mean time the users had to execute each task, each time results is presented in Fig. 12.

Table 3 Results for Ease of Use evaluation

Statements Strongly agree Partially agree Indifferent Partially disagree Strongly disagree

1. The App is easy to understand 80.0 % (8) 10.0 % (1) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
2. The App is easy to use 40.0 % (4) 60.0 % (6) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
3. With little effort, I can browse the services 60.0 % (6) 40.0 % (4) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
4. With little effort, I can add a new service 100.0 % (10) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
5. The options are clear and objective 70.0 % (7) 20.0 % (2) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
General average 70.0 % 26.0 % 4.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 %

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Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
Analyzing the results we can see that we also had good
results related to perception of utility, although a little bit
worse than the previous evaluation. In this assessment, we
had the better result in the fourth statement, regarding the
benefit of using the application for accessing virtual ser-
vices in specific places.
The worst two results are related to the easiness of
browsing services and also related to the use of the appli-
cation, if available. In this last case, the fact that some
participants were iOS (iPhone) users, influenced in the
response.
In general, both quantitative and qualitative evaluations
of usability were encouraging and showed good results.
The rates obtained in the experiments indicate that Mingle
is a model technologically accepted by this group of users.
8 Related works
There are some proposals that explore the concepts of
social network applied to the mobile and ubiquitous com-
puting field. Among those, we considered the most repre-
Fig. 11 General results for Ease of Use evaluation
Table 4 Results for perception of utility evaluation
Statements Strongly agree
1. The menu options were relevant 70.0 % (7)
2. The App makes it easy to browse services 50.0 % (5)
3. The App makes it easy to share services 60.0 % (6)
4. The App eases the use of services in a specific place 100.0 % (10)
5. I would use the App if available 50.0 % (5)
General average 66.0 %
Page 11 of 13 158
sentative and also the models that had some spontaneity,
i.e., create social networks related to a specific context.
MobiClique (Pietilainen et al. 2009) defines a spontaneous
social network created from the opportunistic approaching of
mobile devices. Using Bluetooth, the model creates the social
network eliminating the need for a central server.
Another related work is SCOPE (Mani et al. 2010) that
proposes a spontaneous P2P social network. As MobiC-
lique, SCOPE does not need a pre-existing infrastructure.
The proposal is based on 802.11 ad hoc protocols. The
project focus is on sharing information and content, but
does not support services.
MobiSoC (Gupta et al. 2009), on the other hand, is a
middleware to capture, manage and share community
social states. The project incorporates discovery algorithms
to detect emergent geo-social patterns in communities to
characterize the represented social states. MobiSoC tries to
associate people present in the same place to spontaneous
collaborate.
At last, we had considered SenseWorld (Ganti et al.
2008), which focuses on employing social networks to
build sensing applications. Besides connecting users to
software components, sensors are used to detect context
information. SenseWorld uses many information regarding
users and their surroundings, but does not allow sponta-
neous interoperation among people, neither the sharing of
services and contents.
Compared to the related works, the main difference is
that Mingle focuses on providing a virtual layer of services,
contents and interactions based on a specific physical
location. Although some approaches allow spontaneous
interaction, they do not provide a straightforward way of
sharing services and contents. Another difference is that
some works, like MobiClique or SCOPE, are based on
opportunistic proximity of users. Instead, Mingle point of
convergence is a place, and around this focal point all
interactions occur. Finally, Mingle is a more general
approach, especially if compared to MobiSOC, which is
specific to deal with social states, and Sense World,
focused on sensing and inferring context.
Partially agree Indifferent Partially disagree Strongly disagree
20.0 % (2) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
40.0 % (4) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
30.0 % (3) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
40.0 % (4) 10.0 % (1) 0.0 % (0) 0.0 % (0)
26.0 % 8.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 %
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158 Page 12 of 13
Fig. 12 General results for perception of utility evaluation
9 Conclusion
The recent popularization of mobile devices, which came
in the form of smartphones and tablets, allows possibilities
not envisioned before. Today, with the great availability of
devices and almost ubiquitous wireless connection, we
have the development of applications that explore the
concepts of context awareness and social networks. In this
perspective we present in this work a model for a sponta-
neous social network, named Mingle.
Bearing in mind the idea of ubiquitous interaction
among people and environment, we modeled Mingle to
help answer four basic questions:
Who is here?
Where can I go?
What can I obtain in this environment, in terms of
services and contents?
When an event of my interest will happen here?
Comparing with the considered related works, Mingle
allows a vast range of connections, not being restricted by
one technology. Furthermore, Mingle brings the possibility
to share information and content related to specific loca-
tions. Another characteristic of the model proposed is the
possibility that user has of adding services and contents.
The proposed model was divided in various modules,
each one in charge of a set of different data, which act to
clients as data persistence (knowledge base) and ad hoc
processor, filtering data and reducing the quantity of stor-
age and processing needed by those clients. This feature is
especially desirable when clients are smartphones or tab-
lets, because the limited capacity in terms of processing
power and battery.
We developed an ontology to Mingle that stores all the
information regarding cells, making possible the use of
inferences and the development of rules. The Mingle server
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Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. (2014) 4:158
uses this knowledge base, not hindering the performance of
Mingle client.
To evaluate our proposal, we implemented the server of
a cell and also a client prototype for Android smartphones.
We employed in this process many technologies that are
popular today and that ease the use of Mingle anywhere,
such as the use of web services.
The experiments regarding the server performance
indicated that this transfer of role, from client to server,
does not create the need of a huge server with great pro-
cessing power and available RAM to attend a small number
of users.
The usability evaluation shows that Mingle prototype
had a good acceptance. The effectiveness was 100 % for
executing all tasks. We got good efficiency percentages,
above 80 %, with a mean learnability of about 72 %.
Regarding satisfaction we applied the Technology Accep-
tance Model and obtained encouraging results regarding
Ease of Use and Perception of Utility.
As future work, we intend to expand the server allowing
the management of multiple cells. Moreover, we are
planning the possibility of information sharing among
different cells, regarding users and their history. Finally,
we plan to increase the evaluation applying Minge in a real
environment and testing the server with loads generated
from that use.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank Fundacao de Amparo a`
Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS) and Conselho
Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientfico e Tecnologico (CNPq) for
partially financing this research. Finally, we thank University of Vale
do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), and particularly Applied Computing
Graduate Program (PIPCA) for their support in this research.
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