Modeling Human Activities for Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing: The Magubi Approach

Service discovery is an important part of pervasive computing. Present mainstream service-discovery protocols are to a high degree focused on the immediate properties of services and devices, as well as ensuring a high degree of connectivity. As the amount of discovered available services and devices go up, the challenge becomes how to ensure that systems and humans find relevant services, without overloading the systems or humans. Magubi is a model and implementation that is able to not only do advanced standard service discovery, but also, by viewing human tasks and activities as services, is able to expand the realm of service discovery for pervasive computing while addressing the overload challenge. Here, we present the model, and how we model services, humans, and activities. By taking the magubi-approach, service discovery also becomes proactive and is able to assist in a wide range of human endeavors.