The emergence of coordination models and languages for the design and development of today multi-component software systems calls for a precise understanding and definition of what coordination is, what coordination models and languages are, and what they are meant to. In this paper, we aim at providing a conceptual framework for coordination, as well as an operational framework for the semantic characterisation of coordination models and languages. The main goals of this framework are (i) to deal with the intrinsic unformalisability of interactive systems, and (ii) to be simple yet expressive enough to work as a clean and effective specification for the implementation of a coordinated system. The effectiveness of the framework defined is shown by applying it to the general description of tuple-based coordination models. The expressiveness of the corresponding operational framework is then exploited for the full operational characterisation of a logic tuple-based coordination model.