Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.

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Public display technology (like digital signage) and private one (like smartphones) has advanced significantly in capacity, capability and spread over the past years. For the provision of information services in display technology rich settings we draw the analogy to biological ecosystems as a community of living organisms together with nonliving components of the environment, linked together through information flows, and by that acting as a global system. We identify individuals in the information society with their situational information demands and their implicit and explicit interaction styles as the living, and the plethora of display devices as the non-living part of an information ecosystem. A local interactions oriented service architecture is developed, the SAPERE pervasive service substrate. A situation aware social feedback mechanism is proposed and implemented in the SAPERE architecture, demonstrating how incentivizing local interactions can stand as a principle to attain desirable global information balance.

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for "browsing the world", i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed. In this paper we propose a simple model for the representation of contextual information, the design and implementation of a general infrastructure for browsing the world, as well as some exemplar services we have implemented over it