Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces

Pervasive computing (sometimes called ubiquitous computing) is a vision of our future computing lifestyle in which computer systems seamlessly integrate into our everyday lives, providing services and information in an “anywhere, anytime” fashion. Working toward this vision, researchers have developed a wide variety of pervasive computing applications and infrastructures. Pineau and colleagues,1 for example, developed a mobile robotic assistant that provides reminding and guiding services to senior citizens with mild cognitive and physical impairments. Song and colleagues2 created a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that lets users discover and compose services based on the tasks they intend to perform. Roman and colleagues3 built a novel middleware infrastructure for managing resources and services in a user-centric active-space environment. We have designed and implemented a pervasive computing system called EasyMeeting. It supports users in a smart meeting-room environment in which a distributed system of intelligent agents, services, devices, and sensors share a common goal: to provide relevant services and information to meeting participants on the basis of their contexts. By context, we mean a model of a location and its environmental attributes (such as temperature, noise level, and light intensity), and the people, physical objects, and computing entities it contains. This model necessarily extends to recognizing and representing the actives and tasks occurring in a location as well as the beliefs,