Supporting mobile collaboration with service-oriented mobile units

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing extend collaboration scenarios. A current strategy to address productive, educational and social problems is to incorporate mobile workers using computing devices into work practices. Typically, collaborative applications intended to support mobile workers involve some type of centralized data or services. This situation constrains the collaboration capabilities, particularly in ad-hoc communication scenarios. We propose an autonomous software module able to provide and consume services from others units. We call it a Service-Oriented Mobile Unit (SOMU). A SOMU has been implemented as a middleware running on laptops and PDAs. Collaborative mobile applications developed on this middleware are then able to interact among them almost in any communication scenario. Availability of this tool is particularly relevant to support mobile collaboration when there is no stable communication support or no communication at all.