Distributed shared contexts

Abstract

Mobile solutions have gone beyond the role of personal tool to offer solutions in supporting coordinated work. Mobile workers shift constantly from individual to group work, access shared virtual environments from different devices and can create new elements when disconnected (annotations, appointments, etc.). However, current approaches focus either on individual or group work, as well as on the restrictions and affordances that mobile devices and mobility provides, but they do not address the huge heterogeneity, inconsistencies and complexity derived when both working modes are mixed. We are interested in the construction of virtual environments that can be accessed transparently anywhere, anytime on anything, but also exploit the advantages that mobility aware technologies provide. Context-based design facilitates the construction of such environments because they isolate and provide structure to the application layer facilitating adaptation to devices' characteristics, reducing the impact of devices heterogeneity and easing the shift among different working modes. © Springer-Verlag 2004.