Towards Self-Organizing Knowledge Networks for Smart World Infrastructures

The increasing ubiquity of sensing, computing and communication devices is forming the basis of a “smart world infrastructure”, with the potential to offer us panoply of innovative pervasive services. However, it also calls for such services to operate in a situation-aware and fully autonomic way. To achieve this, services would require a high degree of supporting knowledge about the social, computational, and physical environments in which they are situated, as well as self-knowledge about their own functioning. While the technology to acquire these types of knowledge is increasingly available, environments and services can actually get ‘smarter’ only via the availability of properly represented and widely accessible “networks of knowledge”, which can provide – via self-organization – for pruning, aggregating, correlating, the available knowledge, so as to facilitate their exploitation by components and services. In this paper, after having introduced the general vision of smart world infrastructures, we detail our idea of knowledge networks by outlining the characteristics that they should exhibit and by sketching a possible architectural approach for knowledge networks.