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Mobile or pervasive environments are inherently characterised by a high degree of dynamics and frequent changes in the environmental properties. This makes collaborative work of mobile users eminently difficult as the coordination of their work processes needs to adapt steadily to these changing circumstances. As location is one of the most critical changing context dimensions, this adaptive coordination and subsequent re-orientation are mostly based on distinctive temporal and spatial objects (the so-called Schelling points). The contribution of this article is to show the benefit of exploiting the human behaviour of using spatial objects for coordination (which we refer to as location-oriented coordination). We present an approach for which we implemented the location-oriented coordination considerations as a coordination pattern embedded in a coordination architecture, which serves as a runtime environment. By adopting this approach in a representative collaborative work scenario (in the domain of emergency management) and by presenting results from user tests we show its applicability and benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of contextual information about the real world (e.g., collected by sensors) with information coming from the virtual world (e.g., the Web 2.0), may represent an enormous enrichment particularly for services organized and provided by agents in ubiquitous environments. To address the challenging need for coordination in such environments, and to provide the user a high-level of service quality, an engineered approach to exploit such information is required. Such an approach should generate added-value by offering means for combining diverse data sources, should allow delivering contextsensitive information and, hence, should promote context-dependent coordination of entities in ubiquitous environments. In this paper, we report the scenario-based analysis of key requirements for ubiquitous environments that we have used as the basis for the design of our proposal. Following, our proposal for the Ubiquitous Coordination Model (UbiCoMo) and its associated infrastructure is detailed. The UbiCoMo model covers an expressive data model based on four-field tuples to represent contextual information, data distribution and management concepts based on tuple spaces, and the integration of coordination patterns to resolve reoccurring coordination problems in ubiquitous scenarios. The UbiCoMo infrastructure integrates the fundamental mechanisms for agent-based coordination in ubiquitous environments, and is well-suited to provide the specific means required to offer high-level services and context-sensitive functionalities. A concrete ubiquitous application, the living diary, is assumed as a case study both to illustrate the requirements analysis and to exemplify the usage and the suitability of UbiCoMo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]