Active coordination artifacts in collaborative ubiquitous-computing environments

Coordination artifacts play a primary role in cooperation and, in particular, active artifacts allow for the development of flexible cooperative software systems. Their role with respect to ubiquitous-computing environments can be defined, exploited, and assessed according to different perspectives. This paper presents a notion of active artifact that relies on the seminal definition given in CSCW literature by Schmidt and Simone, and it is applied to a model for systems supporting ubiquitous-computing collaborative environments (CASMAS). A technique to configure and interact with such environments, i.e., the composition of devices' functionalities according to their high-level features, and services provided, is presented. A scenario is used as an in-depth example along the paper. The architecture of a system implementing the scenario using our reference middleware is presented