An Approach to Compute the Scope of a Social Object in a Multi-IoT Scenario

In the last few years, classical social networking is turning into the more complex social internetworking and is extending from human users to objects. Indeed, objects are becoming increasingly complex, smart and social so that several authors have recently started to investigate the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and the Multiple IoT (MIoT) paradigms. SIoT is more oriented to the technological issues to be faced in presence of multiple IoT interacting with each other. Instead, MIoT addresses data-driven and semantics-based aspects because it considers the contents exchanged by smart objects during their transactions. In such a research context, the concept of scope in a Multi-IoT scenario can play an important role. In this paper, we investigate this issue. In particular, first we define the concept of scope in a Multi-IoT scenario. Then, we propose two formalizations of this concept allowing the computation of its values. Afterwards, we present two possible applications of scope. Finally, we describe a set of experiments performed for its evaluation; the last of them compares scope with diffusion degree and influence degree, two parameters already proposed in past literature.