Designing Mobile Shared Workspaces for Loosely Coupled Workgroups

Communication and coordination patterns to support mobile collaboration

“…This matrix allows to developers to select one or more design pattern in order to deal with a particular problem/limitation. These proposed patterns have been implemented in a middleware platform [12] and several applications are currently using these reusable designs [12,13]. Among these applications are mobile collaborative applications to support disaster relief operations, to conduct inspections in construction sites and to manage exams in computer science courses.…”

“…Typically they require functionalities for data synchronization and on-demand collaboration with other people. Given the uncertainty about the next collaboration scenario and its characteristics, mobile users need autonomous, flexible and interoperable collaborative solutions, regardless of the availability of centralized resources or communication infrastructure [13]. When two or more mobile users meet, their physical location should not be a limitation to collaborate.…”

“…This is because the MANETs have a high disconnection rate when they are used by wireless computing devices carried on by mobile users [13]. …”

“…There are several experiences reporting the use of collaborative mobile applications [13]. Although some of these applications are fully-distributed, they do not describe or analyze the strategies used to deal with the requirements identified in section 2.…”

Evaluating a Mobile Emergency Response System

“…From an organizational perspective, this means that situated decision making models such as the garbage can [23] are more applicable to our context than traditional rational choice models [24]. Regarding the support to mobility, several collaborative solutions have already been proposed [25][26][27][28][29]. Although these proposals have shown useful to support specific collaborative activities, they were not designed to address emergency management.…”