Grounding ecologies on multiple spaces

The paper introduces an architectural model, which pairs virtual and physical ecologies into augmented ecologies. The notion of space as a first class concept fosters a neat separation of the two main parts of an ecology: the environment and the organisms it contains. Virtual organisms view the common environment through multiple ecology spaces, described in terms of core space models and related by mappings between locations. This leads to a flexible space-aware paradigm supporting the indirect communication between organisms, including both message passing and data sharing. Finally, the paper presents a concrete framework reifying the model and an example application.