Groups and group instantiations in mobile communities - Detection, modeling and applications

The paper investigates techniques for the detection and modeling of groups of people in a mobile community also interacting in the real world. In this scenario, the concept of contextual manifestations or instantiations of existing social groups is of special significance. In view of detecting and modeling of groups and their instantiations, several examples for classes of data (location- and velocity-data, natural language interest phrases and text-based communication-data) in the information spaces of mobile communities are investigated. Similarity measures between people are constructed and verified by empiric means or through stochastic simulation. On this basis, special clustering approaches for the detection and modeling of groups are developed and tested. The paper concludes with a discussion on possible applications for the methods which have been developed.