Publish/subscribe vs. shared dataspace coordination infrastructures. Is it just a matter of taste?

Two train architectural styles emerged in the panorama of inter-agent coordination infrastructures: the publish/subscribe model, according to which agents communicate via the raising and catch of events, and the shared-dataspace - Linda-like - approach in which communication is achieved by introducing and consuming objects from a common repository. In this paper we perform a rigorous comparison of the two approaches with a particular emphasis on their interchangeability. We obtain the following results: (1) the shared dataspace model can be reduced to the publish/subscribe architecture, while (2) the vice versa holds only if a global coordination operation is provided among the shared dataspace operations.