Coping with the Dynamics of Open, Social Media on Mobile Devices with Mobile Facets

When traveling to a foreign city or wanting to know what is happening in one’s home area, users today often search and explore different social media platforms. In order to provide different social media sources in an integrated manner on a mobile device, we have developed Mobile Facets. Mobile Facets allows for the faceted, interactive search and exploration of social media on a touchscreen mobile phone. The social media is queried live from different data sources and professional content sources like DBpedia, a Semantic Web version of Wikipedia, the event directories Eventful and Upcoming, geo-located Flickr photos, and GeoNames. Mobile Facets provides an integrated retrieval and interactive exploration of resources from these social media sources such as places, persons, organizations, and events. One does not know in advance how many facets the application will receive from such sources in a specific contextual situation and how many data items for the facets will be provided. Thus, the user interface of Mobile Facets is to be designed to cope with this dynamics of social media.