PALASS: A Portable Application for a Location-Aware Social System

In this paper we present PALASS, a location-aware framework for portable handheld devices based on the Google Android platform. Location-aware systems are context-sensitive systems that provide information based on current location. We expand this model to include social dimension where events are shared among users of social groups and are graphically displayed using maps in Android handheld devices. The framework is built as a web service supporting the dynamic addition of geographically-located social events, which are automatically filtered according to the group affiliations of each user. To emphasize the implementation-independence of this approach, the framework defines roles for different functionalities, each with clearly defined tasks that simplify the overall interface of the system. Other location-aware systems are also explored to show how they relate to the PALASS framework.