An architecture for supporting face-to-face mobile interaction

A lot of groupware systems for stationary computers have been already developed, but a question remains open: How can we achieve a proportional diversity of this kind of systems for mobile devices? In this paper, we try to answer this question by proposing an architecture for a development toolkit, which aims to provide reusable building tools that facilitate the implementation of mobile groupware systems intended to support collaborative authoring with support for concurrent accesses. The design of the toolkit architecture is motivated by the dificulties found in the development of software for mobile devices, e.g., unexpected network disconnections. Particularly, the proposed tools offer functionality for consistency maintenance of shared information using Operational Transformation, network communication over Bluetooth-based ad-hoc networks, and group awareness support employing an event-based interface.