GAMA-Mall - Shopping in Communities

In this article, we consider market places as social places. Social places provide social presence and interaction. Virtual market places often lack in these social factors. Community support tools, such as chat systems or newsgroups try to fill this gap. We argue that a new architecture is needed that brings together customers with common interests. We propose a combined system called GAMA-Mall based on a spatial representation of the shop, which implements this architecture.