A semantic framework for self-adaptive networked appliances

User demands and technological advances are moving us closer to the pervasive computing vision. The home of the future includes networked appliances that publish the functions they offer as intelligent middleware services providing flexible, intuitive and zero-maintenance mechanisms for dynamic service composition, deployment, extensibility, management and usage. Whilst much work exists relating to service-oriented frameworks, this typically relies on attribute-based service matching and discovery, which is inherently restrictive since no universally agreed service description or taxonomy is available to describe services homogeneously. Device manufacturers inadvertently use different vocabularies to describe services and therefore ambiguities between terms are likely. In this paper we address these issues and describe our networked appliance service utilisation framework (NASUF), which illustrates how services offered by networked appliances can be semantically composed to extend device capabilities and perform a plethora of data adaptation functions to automatically resolve any composition conflicts that may occur. We have developed a prototype to test NASUF and our findings show that the framework can dynamically compose services provided by networked appliances in peer-to-peer networks.