Fiia: user-centered development of adaptive groupware systems

Adaptive groupware systems support changes in users' locations, devices, roles and collaborative structure. Developing such systems is difficult due to the complex distributed systems programming involved. In this paper, we introduce Fiia, a novel architectural style for groupware. Fiia is user-centered, in that it allows easy specification of groupware structured around users' settings, devices and applications, and where adaptations are specified at a high level similar to scenarios. The Fiia.Net toolkit automatically maps Fiia architectures to a wide range of possible distributed systems, under control of an annotation language. Together, these allow developers to work at a high level, while retaining control over distribution choices.