Supporting Mobile Collaboration in Spatially Distributed Workgroups with Digital Interactive Maps

Following the mobile computing trend, business logics of distributed, cooperative applications started to move into the mobile client applications. With this shift, the cooperation aspect may also exploit the user’s location and situation context and integrate it into the actual collaboration. In this article, we present an approach for a Collaborative Map that exploits the spatial context of the members of a distributed group as a means to visualize and provide collaboration functionality. Then, a number of location-related cooperation methods become feasible such as getting an overview of the spatial distribution of team members, identify an ad-hoc meeting place nearby, or chat with a group member who has a certain expertise in his profile. With CoMa, we move from standard collaboration tools that marginally consider spatial information towards context-aware mobile collaborative systems that can support a wide range of applications where human resources have to be coordinated in a spatial context and tasks need to be assigned dynamically depending on capabilities and situation context.