Good Manners for Pervasive Computing--An Approach Based on the Ambient Calculus

When people interact, they follow distinct rules that coordinate the order of speech, who opens doors, whom and how to greet, and many things more. Such a social codex depends on the milieu - or ambience - people are acting in. People breaking the codex are either considered badly educated or foreigners to the ambience - sometimes even both. In pervasive computing a multitude of applications is expected to populate our environment and to follow objects and users throughout their daily journey. Consequently, we will need a new codex or manners - for pervasive computing applications that controls the interaction between applications. Such a codex will have to incorporate our existing codices as well as technical aspects. In this work in progress paper we present an approach to extend our prior work on pervasive computing system support by specifying interdependencies of applications based on the ambient calculus. This allows specifying and technically enforcing "manners" for pervasive computing applications