The notions of coordination, collaboration and cooperation have originated a number of heterogeneous research lines in diverse scientific areas, both inside and outside Computer Science — along with a number of different acceptations for the terms as well. The basic and almost obvious correlation between these terms, however, has not yet led to a satisfactory scientific overall picture that could put them in the right perspective, emphasizing their commonalities and distinctions. Still, there is a great potential for cross-fertilization between the different strands of work. In particular, if the mutual relationship between these terms was understood and commonly accepted, it would be much easier to adapt and apply many innovative ideas developed by the different communities to the field of cooperative information systems. In this article, we outline a possible unified conceptual framework, by suitably re-interpreting findings from Activity Theory. There, a clear definition for both coordination and cooperation as collaborative activities can be found and used as a reference, which is centred around the notion of (coordination) artifact. Then, we gladly introduce four contributions, selected from the best papers of the 18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing and suitably revised for the International Journal on Cooperative Information Systems, that show how some of the most recent results of the research on coordination can be fruitfully exploited and applied to the field of cooperative information systems.
Identifying reusable services from collaborative activities using activity theory (AT): The Activity-Based Service Identification Framework (ASIF)
