A Self-Organizing Approach for Building and Maintaining Knowledge Networks

Pervasive and mobile devices can generate huge amounts of contextual data, from which knowledge about situations occurring in the world can be inferred for the use of pervasive services. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the distributed and dynamic nature of pervasive systems, this may be not a trivial task. Indeed the management of contextual data should be run by a dedicate middleware layer, i.e., knowledge networks in charge of organizing and aggregating such data to facilitate its exploitation by pervasive services. In this paper we introduce a unsupervised, distributed and self-organizing approach to build and maintain such a layer based on simple agents that organize and extract useful information from the data space. We also present a Java-based implementation of the approach and discuss experimental results.