A community based metaphor supporting EUD within communities

The paper proposes an approach to EUD focusing on communities: on the one hand, users are considered as a community of cooperating actors; on the other hand, applications and devices are considered as a (artificial) community that, by interacting with those actors, cooperate to support their collaboration. This idea facilitates an integration based on modularization and abstraction, by applying to the technology principles that are derived from human collaboration: in so doing, it others a uniform approach that allows users with different technical capabilities to operate at different levels of abstraction by applying the same conceptual tools. The community metaphor inspires a model that helps the users community integrating devices and applications according to its needs. In turn, the model defines a layered structure of primitives: from the basic ones up to the domain and application dependent ones, passing through the domain and application independent primitives. The approach is illustrated by an example in the education domain: the interaction flows in an augmented classroom can be defined and adapted by communities where teachers, tutors and students organize their collaboration.