Self-Organized Data Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: The Knowledge Networks Approach

Abstract

Pervasive computing services exploit information about the physical world both to adapt their own behavior in a context-aware way and to deliver to users enhanced means of interaction with their surrounding environment. The technology to acquire digital information about the physical world is becoming more available, making services at risk of being overwhelmed by such growing amounts of data. This calls for novel approaches to represent and automatically organize, aggregate, and prune such data before delivering them to services. In particular, individual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology in which, by linking and combining with each other into sorts of "knowledge networks" (KNs), they are able to provide compact and easyto-be-managed higher level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need to evolve from models of "context awareness" toward models of "situation awareness" via proper self-organized "KN" tools, and we introduce a general reference architecture for KNs. Second, we describe the design and implementation of a KN toolkit that we have developed, and we exemplify and evaluate algorithms for knowledge self-organization integrated within it. Open issues and future research directions are also discussed.

Research on Pervasive Knowledge Service Field

“…(2) Technology of knowledge organization Pervasive knowledge service is a service emphasizes the concept of "people-oriented", therefore, the way to construct knowledge should centre on "people". It is to say that knowledge should be organized by way which can be easily understood by people, rather than the way of traditional engineering [7,8]. In order to form the library of components or paradigms which are required by knowledge service assignments, it is necessary to use semantic grid, otology technology, fuzzy language technology and intelligent analysis technology comprehensively to build the problem oriented or task oriented knowledge components or problem solving paradigms.…”

Looking ahead in pervasive computing: Challenges and opportunities in the era of cyber–physical convergence

“…Most current approaches to context-awareness leave up to each component of the system to access and digest the information required for adaptation decisions, but this task can become overwhelming if awareness has to encompass both situations occurring at the many different levels of the system and the strict locality of components. Thus, a challenging research issue is defining novel tools to provide components of the pervasive computing infrastructure with expressive and compact representations of complex multi-faceted situations, so as to effectively drive each and every activity of the components in a collectively coordinated way [17].…”

Self-organizing virtual macro sensors

“…More generally, the ViMS approach represents a mechanism to extract and collect semantic knowledge about an unknown environment [Bicocchi et al 2010]. For example, one could think of randomly deploying sensors over some labyrinthine environment, have the sensor network selforganize into macro sensors based on light and/or sound patterns, and then, if each region could recognize and report about neighboring regions, dynamically reconstruct a map of the area and of its salient environmental characteristics.…”