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

Long-duration transaction support in design databases

In the paper new functionalities for design databases are proposed which are necessary to improve a cooperative work of design team members. These functionalities mainly concern versioning aspects of design environments. First, new versioning technique, called delayed versionning, is proposed. This technique supports designers working in shared environments. It substantially increases a concurrency degree of designers transactions. Next, a new versioning concept, called temporary database version, is introduced. Its purpose is to isolate long-duration read-only transactions from other transactions, in order to maximize the system efficiency. Afterwards, a new technique for transactions savepoints management is proposed. It supports long-duration transactions which are often rolled back to particular points of corresponding design activities, due to unsatisfactory directions of the design evolution. Finally, a solution for useless design environments removaf is proposed. All the functionalities mentioned above are currently implemented in the multiversion database prototype. 1 introduction Computer aided design (CA D) is an interactive group process in which the progress is reached step-by-step by creat]on of improved versions of the product designed. Each stage of this process requmes sharing and exchanging information among members of the group, that consists in importing and exporting temporary and final versions of product components among different computer sites of the federated environment. After many iterations go-ahead or rofl-back, a final version of the product is developed, which may be released to manufacturers. Recently CAD applications are built around object-oriented databasse systems ( OODBs) which combine features of object-oriented languages and traditional databases. CAD applications require, on one hand, complex data structures to represent schemas, pictures, photos, graphs, sounds etc., as well as modeling mechanisms which may be used to express complex relationships between data. Hopefully, these mecha-Parmmmn to make digitallhard c ies of all or part of this rneteriel th