Towards effects-based service description and integration in pervasive environments

In the vision of pervasive computing environments, these are populated by smart devices which adapt depending on the user context in order to meet the user needs and look after them. Nevertheless, current devices describe their functionalities in a very simple manner (not in an expressive way) and therefore, it is difficult to automate the behaviour of the environment, service discovery and aggregation. Some current research works are trying to tackle these problems. In a previous work we justified the need for an effects- and conditions-based approach for service representation in this kind of environments. An analysis of the main semantic service description languages was also carried out, concluding that none of them provides an ontological model for effects and conditions definition. The main aim of this research work is to cover this gap defining and describing an ontology for semantic representation of effects and conditions for user interaction, service discovery and service integration in pervasive environments.