Implicit environment-based coordination in pervasive computing

By immersing computational systems into the physical world, pervasive computing brings us from traditional desktop computing interactions into a form closer to human interactions, which are characterized by their dependance on the environment. Furthermore, acting within the environment can contribute in many cases to a form of implicit interaction in which no explicit communication message is exchanged. However, this way of interacting cannot be achieved without a shared common knowledge with a well defined semantic. This appeals to explore a new approach of interaction mediated by the environment, closer to human interactions, and therefore, more suitable to achieve the intended silent computation of pervasive computing.To address this issue, we present in this paper XCM; a generic coordination model for pervasive computing. XCM is organized around few abstract concepts (entity, environment, social law and port) and is expressed as an ontology. While the abstract concepts of XCM deal with the environmental representation and context-dependency, the ontological representation allows to achieve knowledge sharing and context reasoning.