Location-Mediated Service Coordination in Ubiquitous Computing

We propose location-mediated service coordination in ubiquitous computing. In the coordination, middle agents determine bestmatched services for a user by considering the user’s location based on location-ontology for ubiquitous computing. Introducing such location-aware middle agents and location-ontology into ubiquitous computing, we can extend application areas of software agents from the Internet to the real world. In this paper, we first illustrate the idea of location-aware middle agents and location-ontology. Second, we describe a multiagent architecture, called CONSORTS, as an implementation of the agents. In order to bridge the gap between device-oriented physical information in the real world and web-based conceptual information in the digital world, CONSORTS agents can translate sensor-based raw representation of the locations into conceptual one. Finally, we describe two applications of CONSORTS, an intelligent information assist system at a museum and wireless-LAN based location system.