Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationControlled clinical terminologies are essential to realizing the benefits of electronic health record systems. However, implementing consistent and sustainable use of terminology has proven to be both intellectually and practically challenging. First, this project derives a conceptual understanding of the scope and intricacies of the challenge by applying informatics principles, practical experience, and real-world requirements. Equipped with this understanding, various approaches are explored and from this analysis a unique solution is defined. Finally, a working environment that meets the requirements for creating, maintaining, and distributing terminologies was created and evaluated

The Brand is the Bundle Strategies for the Mobile Ecosystem

The current mobile ecosystem is best understood in terms of a monopolistic competition model, characterised by heterogeneous producers providing a range of differentiated products for consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Product differentiation offers producers some market power, ultimately constrained by imperfect substitutes from rivals and the threat of market entry. To achieve their goals, consumers require a mixture of products from the network, handset and application domains. Reduced search and other transaction costs are a demand-side benefit of product bundling. Producers in this market have high fixed costs and low marginal costs. High fixed costs discourage entry, which increases the market power of producers. Low marginal costs and uncorrelated customer preferences across products for individual consumers encourage producers to expand their sales using supply-side bundling. Thus there are strong supply and demand side benefits from product bundling. We argue that producers will compete in terms of differentiated bundles combining network, handset and application features, with branding as the essential strategy for bundle differentiation. Successful business strategies will require direct access to customers and information about their specific preferences. For illustration, we look at the currently apparent strategies of Google, Apple and Nokia. The mobile ecosystem is complex but not unique. Strong parallels can be drawn between the mobile ecosystem and the television ecosystem. Google appears to be following a "free to air" strategy and Apple a "pay TV" strategy in bundle differentiation. Television manufacturers are largely undifferentiated and have little market power: this may be the fate of handset manufacturers and network operators who are comparatively powerless to withstand the evolutionary development of the mobile ecosystem.Business ecosystem, platform, monopolistic competition, product bundling, heterogeneous demand, business strategies, mobile telephony, mobile applications, branding, price discrimination.

Design framework:redesign and new multi-user and testing support

The use of models to conceptualize systems is an important part of the process of building Cyber Physical Systems. While designing such systems, which are in general a multi-disciplinary activity, multiple designers are involved in the design decisions. Those decisions most likely are not captured and eventually forgotten after a period. The Design Framework is a visual modeling tool that aims to help architects and designers to documents the design rationales besides the design artifacts. It also helps them to collaborate to design a system together in a multidisciplinary environment. The Design Framework is at the level of a good prototype, but it is not ready for operational application by end-users in industry. One of the main issues with the Design Framework system is a sub-optimal code structure due to the lack of proper design and development approach. The assignment therefore is to reverse engineer the current design of the Design Framework and to come up with a new design. In order to maintain a system in use, presence of a test framework is necessary. Since the Design Framework is used in a multi-disciplinary environment, an improvement in the multi-user support of the system is also needed. In the first part of this report, the redesign of the Design Framework is discussed. To redesign the Design Frame-work, a number of refactoring techniques are applied. As a result, the code complexity is reduced, therefore the maintenance is increased. The second part of the assignment includes multi-user support and testability. The Design Framework manages the changes to design descriptions and maintains the history of the design artifacts. In this respect, it operates similar to version control systems. In the multi-user part of this report, the version controlling aspect of the Design Framework is described and synchronization of data for multi-user is elaborated. Finally some multi-user features are improved and developed. In the testability part of this report, the test support is described. A set of unit tests and end-to-end tests including the test for multi-user support is implemented. Provided test sets and the approaches used to setup test environment makes the Design Framework more stable and maintainable

KP-LAB Knowledge Practices Laboratory -- Specification of end-user applications

deliverablesThe present deliverable provides a high-level view on the new specifications of end user applications defined in the WPII during the M37-M46 period of the KP-Lab project. This is the last in the series of four deliverables that cover all the tools developed in the project, the previous ones being D6.1, D6.4 and D6.6. This deliverable presents specifications for the new functionalities for supporting the dedicated research studies defined in the latest revision of the KP-Lab research strategy. The tools addressed are: the analytic tools (Data export, Time-line-based analyser, Visual analyser), Clipboard, Search, Versioning of uploadable content items, Visual Model Editor (VME) and Visual Modeling Language Editor (VMLE). The main part of the deliverable provides the summary of tool specifications and the description of the Knowledge Practices Environment architecture, as well as an overview of the revised technical design process, of the tools’ relationship with the research studies, and of the driving objectives and the high-level requirements relevant for the present specifications. The full specifications of tools are provided in the annexes 1-9

IVOA Recommendation: Vocabularies in the Virtual Observatory Version 1.19

This document specifies a standard format for vocabularies based on the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). By adopting a standard and simple format, the IVOA will permit different groups to create and maintain their own specialised vocabularies while letting the rest of the astronomical community access, use, and combine them. The use of current, open standards ensures that VO applications will be able to tap into resources of the growing semantic web. The document provides several examples of useful astronomical vocabularies

Web Archive Services Framework for Tighter Integration Between the Past and Present Web

Web archives have contained the cultural history of the web for many years, but they still have a limited capability for access. Most of the web archiving research has focused on crawling and preservation activities, with little focus on the delivery methods. The current access methods are tightly coupled with web archive infrastructure, hard to replicate or integrate with other web archives, and do not cover all the users\u27 needs. In this dissertation, we focus on the access methods for archived web data to enable users, third-party developers, researchers, and others to gain knowledge from the web archives. We build ArcSys, a new service framework that extracts, preserves, and exposes APIs for the web archive corpus. The dissertation introduces a novel categorization technique to divide the archived corpus into four levels. For each level, we will propose suitable services and APIs that enable both users and third-party developers to build new interfaces. The first level is the content level that extracts the content from the archived web data. We develop ArcContent to expose the web archive content processed through various filters. The second level is the metadata level; we extract the metadata from the archived web data and make it available to users. We implement two services, ArcLink for temporal web graph and ArcThumb for optimizing the thumbnail creation in the web archives. The third level is the URI level that focuses on using the URI HTTP redirection status to enhance the user query. Finally, the highest level in the web archiving service framework pyramid is the archive level. In this level, we define the web archive by the characteristics of its corpus and building Web Archive Profiles. The profiles are used by the Memento Aggregator for query optimization

Open data and the academy: an evaluation of CKAN for research data management

This paper offers a full and critical evaluation of the open source CKAN software (http://ckan.org) for use as a Research Data Management (RDM) tool within a university environment. It presents a case study of CKAN's implementation and use at the University of Lincoln, UK, and highlights its strengths and current weaknesses as an institutional Research Data Management tool. The author draws on his prior experience of implementing a mixed media Digital Asset Management system (DAM), Institutional Repository (IR) and institutional Web Content Management System (CMS), to offer an outline proposal for how CKAN can be used effectively for data analysis, storage and publishing in academia. This will be of interest to researchers, data librarians, and developers, who are responsible for the implementation of institutional RDM infrastructure. This paper is presented as part of the dissemination activities of the Jisc-funded Orbital project (http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk