This is actually an active area of research in the theory of computation, and computational semantics. Researchers have been hard at work trying to formulate a

This is actually an active area of research in the theory of computation, and computational semantics. Researchers have been hard at work trying to formulate an algebra of ubiquitous computation that can encapsulate the spatial and temporal arrangement of mobile processes (which in this case includes computer processes, physical processes, chemical processes, etc). Graphs (or variants) are the structure that is being used to model these systems. Processes are nodes (or sets of nodes) with an algebraic structure that permits composition and formal reasoning. For an easy-ish overview, check out: -- edit -- this was the wrong set of slides... These are dense. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-Lectures.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-Lectures.pdf The easy ones are here: http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/lectures/bigraphs-tutorial.pdf http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/lectures/bigraphs-tutorial.pdf