Everyobjects in the Pervasive Computing Landscape

Abstract

Information and communication technologies seamlessly and invisibly pervade into everyday objects and environments, delivering services through the ’things’ (artefacts) of the physical world, and adapted to the context of their use. As an approach to link each artefact in the physical world with the software objects in the digital world we propose ’everyobjects’, the symbiosis of technology rich artefacts and a P2P based coordination framework.

A spatial proximity based spontaneous interaction approach for ’shared nothing’ P2P systems has been developed and implemented in our P2P coordination framework. Mobile peers, once in spatial proximity to each other, coordinate their activities based on the exchange and analysis of self descriptions in metadata format. Each peer individually conducts a similarity analysis of the role and profile data received from other peers in vicinity, and invokes triggers if a certain similarity threshold is reached. I will present aspects of the underlying profile description language expressing peer preferences with respect to the particular context in which the interaction is attempted (like time, geoposition, owner, environmental conditions, etc.), the mathematical formulation of similarity metrics and the matching analysis of semistructured data, the mechanisms for consensus finding and coordination in peer ensembles, and the component model within which the framework is implemented. Findings will be demonstrated in scenarios involving our ’Peer-it’ miniaturized hardware platform, serving as a stick-on solution for artefacts.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11914952_55.