Providing Flexible Services for Managing Shared State in Collaborative Systems

To effectively collaborate in Internet environments, it is critical to efficiently manage the shared state of collaboration. However, the management of shared state is highly situational; different collaboration semantics require different measures tailored to their specific needs. Hence, providing a general set of services that meet the management requirements of varying collaboration situations is challenging. In this paper, we discuss our approach to providing such services. The services are made flexible by allowing collaborators to choose appropriate services based on the needs of their collaboration tools and specific characteristics of their shared state. We present the shared state management services provided by our Corona server that embodies our approach and report experience with its use

Data Management Issues and Trade-Offs in CSCW Systems

Substantial interest has developed in recent years in building computer systems that support cooperative work among groups without the need for physical proximity. This paper examines some of the difficult data management issues in designing systems for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Specifically, we consider an example CSCW system to support large-scale team science over the Internet, Collaboratory Builder's Environment; we discuss the issues of managing shared data in such systems, reducing information overload, and providing group awareness and access control. We discuss several promising approaches to these issues. We point out where a significant gap remains in addressing the requirements of such systems and where designers have to make design trade-offs that can be difficult to evaluate. Finally, we discuss several open issues for future work