Eliot,
Picking one piece out of your MUD...
I've floated an idea in draft-lear-mud-framework-00.txt which talks a
little about this. The idea is to learn what the Thing is and then have
its manufacturer communicate to a deployment how the thing is intended
to be used.
This approach worries me. While the manufacturer might not object to this, the
user and the system integrator should. The fact that a device was manufactured
for foo should not stop it being used for bar.
Adrian