NooSphere

Abstract

Distributed interaction is a computing paradigm in which the interaction with a computer system is distributed over multiple devices, users and locations. Designing and developing distributed interaction systems is intrinsically difficult as it requires the engineering of a stable infrastructure to support the actual system and user interface. As an approach to this re-engineering problem, we introduce NooSphere, an activity-centric infrastructure and programming framework that provides a set of fundamental distributed services that enables quick development and deployment of distributed interactive systems. In this paper, we describe the requirements, design and implementation of NooSphere and validate the infrastructure by implementing three canonical real deployable applications constructed on top of the NooSphere infrastructure.

Toccata

“…ABC principles were implemented in multiple systems [1,2,4,19,44], covering various use cases: nomadic work of medical workers, collaborative spaces of development, biology laboratories, etc. These systems are based on multiple architectures: local architectures, where every device has its own activity manager with no possibility of activity roaming and sharing [17,19]; peer to peer architectures, in which each device has an activity manager with a possibility of activity roaming and sharing [2,17]; Client-server architectures, where a core server has an activity manager to whom devices connect to reach an activity [1,17,44] and, finally, hybrid architectures, combining servers with activity managers and devices with (or not) activity managers [4,17].…”