Pervasive computing is by its nature open and extensible, and must integrate the information from a diverse range of sources. This leads to a problem of information exchange, so sub-systems must agree on shared representations. Ontologies potentially provide a well-founded mechanism for the representation and exchange of such structured information. A number of ontologies have been developed specifically for use in pervasive computing, none of which appears to cover adequately the space of concerns applicable to application designers. We compare and contrast the most popular ontologies, evaluating them against the system challenges generally recognized within the pervasive computing community. We identify a number of deficiencies that must be addressed in order to apply the ontological techniques successfully to next-generation pervasive systems.

Pervasive computing systems can be modelled effectively as populations of interacting autonomous components. The key challenge to realizing such models is in getting separately-specified and -developed sub-systems to discover and interoperate with each other in an open and extensible way, supported by appropriate middleware services. In this paper, we argue that nature-inspired coordination models offer a promising way of addressing this challenge. We first frame the various dimensions along which nature-inspired coordination models can be defined, and survey the most relevant proposals in the area. We describe the nature-inspired coordination model developed within the SAPERE project as a synthesis of existing approaches, and show how it can effectively support the multifold requirements of modern and emerging pervasive services. We conclude by identifying what we think are the open research challenges in this area, and identify some research directions that we believe are promising.PostprintPeer reviewe