helios. for developers

create specific modules or social media apps on top of helios core and extension modules

helios. architecture

Helios aims to provide a platform to contribute to the development of decentralised privacy-aware next generation social media apps allowing connections between people and smart devices in a secure way. The platform provides P2P communication and the establishment of person-to-person connections either by subscription or ad-hoc connection methods according to the users’ context and profile, respecting each user’s privacy settings.

The architecture of the open source platform is based on different layer requirements identified during the first year of the project, and is composed by the HELIOS Core, Extension Modules, and Applications. The platform will offer developers the possibility to create new decentralised apps or extension modules to offer additional features on top of the HELIOS core components.

helios. core

Provided by the HELIOS project (initially within the project and after the project by the community), and it can be trusted based on the open source software code and documents detailing the overall architecture and implementations. Detailed information about the core components can be found here. Its core components are:

Core GUI: Includes basic user interface for P2P messaging (like a generic messenger) / posting (similar to a wall) / reacting (e.g., like, love, share, repost, favourite, etc.).
Communication Manager: Includes essential messaging functionalities, discovery of other peers, offering basic media functionalities, etc.
Security & Privacy Manager: Includes, among others, access policies and privacy settings for user profile data. All the necessary functionality for managing user’s security, including encryption functionalities, key management, etc.
Profile Manager: Holds the user profile (schema). It takes explicit user input, can take device sensors input and can take input from modules and applications.
Social Ego Network Manager: It is used to retrieve information about the environment, which affects the user’s social graph, such as the communication of context switches.
Context Manager: Handles all the context-related monitoring and reasoning for the user. Also includes information overload controls notifications management.
Trust Manager: Takes care of calculating and updating trust scores per connection, per context.
Personal Data Storage Manager: Takes care of the data access and layer abstraction for individual personal data storages the user might have, e.g., smart phone or cloud.

helios. extension modules

These modules can be developed by 3rd party developers to offer additional features on top of the HELIOS Core components. During the project, the following modules will be implemented:

Neuro-behavioural classifier: A set of algorithms to analyse the emotional statements of the users to determine an emotional score an ego and an alter to feed the trust model, and to analyse the content shared to give feedback on how users respond to specific content.
Graph mining: To be applied on the user’s local social graph taking the interaction data stored in the user’s core and personal repository to provide higher-level node and ego-network properties as a result of the analysis on the user’s network. This information can be used on the Core for having more information about the user’s interests that is not explicitly provided, or can be used on the upper application layer for building dedicated services.
Media streaming: Handles P2P streaming and media distribution through Video on demand distribution (VoD) and Premium live and VoD streaming distribution and support for multiple connected users.
Payments: Provide automatic payment distribution, subscriptions, pay per use, deferred payment and escrow accounts, and accounting by leveraging blockchain technologies.
Sensor manager: Allows the availability of external sensors via Bluetooth/BLE by abstracting the connection and receiving data from sensors to provide it for both the core and applications layer.

helios. applications

The applications developed use the functionalities and structured information provided by the other layers and can be developed by 3rd party developers looking to provide novel user-centric social network services. During the project life, the following applications will be developed, although the modularity of the platform allows the development of much more applications and modules by 3rd party developers:

Core GUI: Use HELIOS Core APIs to send and receive messages and provide a minimalistic GUI to communicate with other users and create a user profile.
Group communications services: A customisable service for different group communications needs leveraging information about active nodes and context in a network, relationships and associations between users and actors. Processing of all information is envisioned to take place on each user’s personal data storage.
VR authoring tool: A suitable for the project’s concept, IDE that is portable and light-weighted based on Web 3D frameworks, allowing easy authoring of VR experiences. The authoring process will be facilitated by a web interface that enables building a 3D space out of a template, positioning of 3D items in a space and assigning behaviours onto them as a category with inherited properties. Through the authoring tool, curators and users can create virtual experiences that allow for multiple user connection and interaction in virtual spaces.
VR app: Built using the web-based VR authoring tool can be accessed from Google Play or other web repository and allows multiple players/users to participate in real-time and interact through text or voice in a VR environment.
AR overlays: An interface capable of sharing and overlaying content, information and experiences over spatial and/or temporal distances. It communicates with the neuro-behavioural classifier module to characterise the reaction of how users react with the AR content.
Other applications defined according to the selected use cases for piloting.

The applications, also called HELIOS Apps (HApps), and services described in this section already fulfil a large set of features required to demonstrate the functionality of the HELIOS platform and ecosystem.