A Holistic Approach to Cognitive Coordination

A new holistic approach defining and dealing with coordination in smart environments is presented. Coordination has been studied for many years, but a holistic approach from a generic theoretical model to a pervasive application has never been proposed. Our approach defines a generic model in order to understand and develop coordination aspects at a high level of abstraction. The model should help to analyse and design context-, activityand situation-aware applications for smart environments. But, it should also be generic enough to be applicable to other problem domains. In this paper we focus only on the modelling part. Our model is built of an abstraction continuum, starting with the notion of entity, interaction, evolution and rules. The notion of enactive entity is introduced on the most abstract level of the continuum. It encompasses consciousness and intentional behaviour, thus leading to cognitive coordination.