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

"Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"

Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertext

Designing a training tool for imaging mental models

The training process can be conceptualized as the student acquiring an evolutionary sequence of classification-problem solving mental models. For example a physician learns (1) classification systems for patient symptoms, diagnostic procedures, diseases, and therapeutic interventions and (2) interrelationships among these classifications (e.g., how to use diagnostic procedures to collect data about a patient's symptoms in order to identify the disease so that therapeutic measures can be taken. This project developed functional specifications for a computer-based tool, Mental Link, that allows the evaluative imaging of such mental models. The fundamental design approach underlying this representational medium is traversal of virtual cognition space. Typically intangible cognitive entities and links among them are visible as a three-dimensional web that represents a knowledge structure. The tool has a high degree of flexibility and customizability to allow extension to other types of uses, such a front-end to an intelligent tutoring system, knowledge base, hypermedia system, or semantic network

Supporting personalization in a web-based course through the definition of role-based access policies

Role-based access policies model the users domain by means of complex structures where roles, which represent jobs or responsibilities assumed by users, are specialized into more concrete subroles which inherit properties and authorizations from their parents. Such an approach can be applied within the context of educational applications, where different roles are easily identified each of which has different views of the same information items and different capabilities to modify them. Moreover, even though this approach, has only been oriented towards modeling security requirements, it can be extended to support personalized access to the information. In this paper, we describe how to combine the basic principles of RBAC policies and adaptation with a view of providing personalized access to the different types of users of a web-based course. Moreover, we also present Courba, a platform to generate personalized web-based courses using XML to support the definition of access policies.Role-based access policies model the users domain by means of complex structures where roles, which represent jobs or responsibilities assumed by users, are specialized into more concrete subroles which inherit properties and authorizations from their parents. Such an approach can be applied within the context of educational applications, where different roles are easily identified each of which has different views of the same information items and different capabilities to modify them. Moreover, even though this approach, has only been oriented towards modeling security requirements, it can be extended to support personalized access to the information. In this paper, we describe how to combine the basic principles of RBAC policies and adaptation with a view of providing personalized access to the different types of users of a web-based course. Moreover, we also present Courba, a platform to generate personalized web-based courses using XML to support the definition of access policies

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Supporting personalization in a web-based course through the definition of role-based access policies

Role-based access policies model the users domain by means of complex structures where roles, which represent jobs or responsibilities assumed by users, are specialized into more concrete subroles which inherit properties and authorizations from their parents. Such an approach can be applied within the context of educational applications, where different roles are easily identified each of which has different views of the same information items and different capabilities to modify them. Moreover, even though this approach, has only been oriented towards modeling security requirements, it can be extended to support personalized access to the information. In this paper, we describe how to combine the basic principles of RBAC policies and adaptation with a view of providing personalized access to the different types of users of a web-based course. Moreover, we also present Courba, a platform to generate personalized web-based courses using XML to support the definition of access policies.Role-based access policies model the users domain by means of complex structures where roles, which represent jobs or responsibilities assumed by users, are specialized into more concrete subroles which inherit properties and authorizations from their parents. Such an approach can be applied within the context of educational applications, where different roles are easily identified each of which has different views of the same information items and different capabilities to modify them. Moreover, even though this approach, has only been oriented towards modeling security requirements, it can be extended to support personalized access to the information. In this paper, we describe how to combine the basic principles of RBAC policies and adaptation with a view of providing personalized access to the different types of users of a web-based course. Moreover, we also present Courba, a platform to generate personalized web-based courses using XML to support the definition of access policies