The goal of the social metamodel is the definition of a language to specify the relationships among groups of entities represented by roles that are part of a Context Aware System (CAS).
The specification is based on the Society concept that embraces a set of Social Instances and the relationships among them. There are two types of Social Instances: the Role and the Instance (or the Individual). While the Role denotes the capabilities that are common to a group of entities, the Instance denotes a particular state of an entity.
The Specialization relationship is a Role-to-Role relationship that represents the inheritance of capabilities from a role to another.
For instance, suppose that you are providing internet services to a set of web site members at three different levels (Free, Basic and VIP).The amount of services available to users varies according to users’ membership.Basic members have all Free member capabilities in addition to a set that is not avaialble to Free members.Analogously, VIP members have all Basic member capabilities in addition to a set that is not avaialble to Basic members.
The Realization relationship is a Role-to-Instance relationship that represents the capabilities of an entity in a particular state.
For instance, suppose that John is an instance of Basic members. Therefore, John has Free and Basic memeber capabilities.
The Figure 3 shows the Social metamodel.
You can reference this work as:
Ricardo Tesoriero, José A. Gallud, María D. Lozano and Víctor M. R. Penichet. CAUCE: Model-driven Development of Context-aware Applications for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 16, No. 15, pp. 2111-2138. 2010. Link: http://www.jucs.org/jucs_16_15/cauce_model_driven_development