Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management

TL;DR

This paper introduces Prometheus, a decentralized peer-to-peer system that aggregates social data from multiple sources, enabling socially-aware applications with privacy and resilience features, demonstrated through simulations and PlanetLab experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized social data management system that supports social inference and policy compliance, improving data integration and system robustness.

Findings

Good end-to-end response time

Low communication overhead

Resilience to malicious attacks

Abstract

An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time, low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.