Contextual Spaces with Functional Skins as OpenSocial Extension

Portability, flexibility and extensibility are essential features of social media platforms. When such Web platforms are able to take user's context into account, they provide better user experience and enhance the effectiveness of users' actions. In this paper, we discuss an extension to OpenSocial standard, namely contextual space, that shapes the framework, in which people carry out online activities. The proposed contextual space extension defines how a set of OpenSocial widgets are aggregated as a Web environment for a given purpose and with a given functional skin as a user interface. Additionally it allows to create contextualized widgets. In this paper we discuss the proposed extension in details and provide the examples of its use based on real life scenarios. Finally, we detail an implementation scheme.