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Spatio-Temporal Small Worlds for Decentralized Information Retrieval in Social Networking

We discuss foundations and options for alternative, agent-based information retrieval (IR) approaches in Social Networking, especially Decentralized and Mobile Social Networking scenarios. In addition to usual semantic contexts, these approaches make use of long-term social and spatio-temporal contexts in order to satisfy conscious as well as unconscious information needs according to Human IR heuristics. Using a large Twitter dataset, we investigate these approaches and especially investigate the question in how far spatio-temporal contexts can act as a conceptual bracket implicating social and semantic cohesion, giving rise to the concept of Spatio-Temporal Small Worlds.