Being at one with things: The interconnection metaphor for intelligent environments

The paper describes a framework, called Santana, for the development of a diffusely intelligent and cooperative framework among different ubiquitous computing components. Santana is based on the interconnection metaphor so that it can be said that intelligence is not in any part of the environment, but spread over it, emerging from the interconnection and the interacting of the parts, that is, a result of an activity that encompasses users, artifacts, their interactions and all hardware and software components of the environment. The emergence of intelligence in Santana is facilitated by allowing the sharing both of contextual knowledge (know-what knowledge) and of inference code (know-how knowledge) within a structure endowed with dynamic inferential capabilities so that knowledge can be interpreted and transformed into action in the physical environment.