Coordinating Knowledge in Pervasive Environments

A new application of the space-based approach is in knowledge coordination. This knowledge is being published on the "Semantic Web" and is concurrently accessed and used by large numbers of agents distributed across the world. Present coordination models assume that the tuples contain plain data, but when knowledge is the focus of the coordination, some aspects of coordination systems must be revised. In this paper, we concentrate on the issues of tuple-space views and the destructive retrieval of information from the tuple spaces. Knowledge is a concept that is not universally agreed, rather different groups share different views of the world. It is also something that does not cease suddenly to exist, rather it tends to be forgotten as new knowledge replaces it. Hence, coordination systems require new constructs to handle knowledge. Here we introduce the concepts of scoping and fading and describe how these can be applied to support knowledge-based multi-agent coordination on the emerging Semantic Web.