XARE: A framework for developing context-aware applications for co-located collaborative work

By means of groupware systems, collaborators can interact in a distributed or co-located way. In our daily activities (at school or office), collaboration usually occurs at the same time and place with the limited help of general purpose-computing applications at best case. In addition, most of these applications are context-unaware, i.e., they are unable of perceiving the group´s environment, in order to provide information and services useful for the place, time, people, roles, current activities, and devices involved in such collaboration. Multiple research works have been focused on defining and perceiving changes in the context of use of applications, but most of them only provide support for single-user work. Only few frameworks have been centered on modeling context-aware groupware systems, but they just provide theoretical solutions for distributed group work. In this paper, we propose a framework for facilitating the development of context-aware groupware applications intended for co-located collaboration. The proposed framework has been validated by implementing some applications for meeting activities.