Coordinative applications, structured coordination, and meta coordination

Coordination models, languages and systems have been developed since the beginning of the eighties. Their initial focus was on process coordination in parallel systems. The work on Linda initially aimed at providing a way to express parallelism in computations that is independent of the underlying machine architecture (Carriero and Gelernter, 1989). Parallel computations were expressed as single programs, optimized by a precompiler and executed in a single tuplespace, on which a single ensemble of processes operated. An evolution from computations in parallel systems to applications in open systems has taken place in computer systems. While coordination languages have a certain role in parallel computing, they lack real life applications in open systems, and are not recognized as platforms for such. We present a framework for coordination in open systems. It is based on the support of coordination within groups of people by coordinative applications. These applications are implemented on top on coordination technology which provides a structuring of the coordination media and rules on coordination. The agreement on the use of specific coordinative applications and coordination technology is reached by meta coordination. We want to level the potential of coordination technology by embedding it into a framework that includes applications and their deployment.