A semantic mediation framework for architecting federated ubiquitous systems

Despite 20 years of research, ubiquitous systems have yet to become truly ubiquitous. A key challenge is the design for volatility and evolution experienced when those systems are deployed in more than one environment as well as for a substantial time period. The work presented here describes a proposed federated System of Systems (SoS) engineering approach for creating ubiquitous systems based on service-oriented principles. Service orientation is becoming more common for SoS implementation as it supports operational independence, managerial independence, and geographic distribution of constituent systems. However, in a virtual SoS, there is no central management authority and centrally agreed purpose, making interface standardization and integration of capabilities a difficult task. In this paper, we approach this problem by proposing a conceptual ontology-based semantic mediation framework to orchestrate the system engineering activities related to publishing constituent system capabilities during the design stage of the lifecycle, and enable automating capability discovery, selection, and composition at runtime.