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Since it is necessary to realize virtual organizations in networks, to develop systems to be used for realizing various kinds of cooperation support among users is very important as a basis of virtual organizations. VIEW Media has been developed for such a purpose, utilizing CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) and database technologies. By introducing the concept of environment, VIEW Media supports flexible information sharing mechanisms. The major purpose of this paper is to show the advantages of the environment model for flexible sharing. Several well-known models are compared and then a representative model, the room model, is selected for comparison to develop the same application. Since the environment model is more general than the room model, we decided to develop "debate systems" which are rather complicated yet can be realized by both models. Debate systems can be regarded as generalization of conference systems and thus we believe the comparison is appropriate. By real usage of debate systems developed by VIEW Media (the environment model) and TeamWave (the room model), the environment model is shown to be suitable for such applications.

Locking is a commonly used mechanism in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for coordinating concurrent users and implementing various styles of information sharing. Part of a sharing style's definition is the granularity of shared objects. Since this varies among different applications, it is desirable to provide a range of different lock granules. In this paper, I first examine existing multiple granularity locking protocols and I evaluate their suitability for CSCW. My main contribution is the development of a new such protocol specifically for CSCW, which provides versionable object locking, guarantees conflict freedom, prevents update loss and ensures greater concurrency than other locking protocols. Its suitability for CSCW is justified by a comparative performance analysis.

Software development for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is a notoriously difficult task, involving often concurrent processes which are bound up with rigid timing constraints. To cope effectively with this difficulty, we propose in this paper the use of abstract finite-state models. The utility of these models is illustrated by encoding a CSCW system that we have built into finite-state automata, specifying in them a number of desired properties with temporal logic, and verifying these properties with model checking. By incorporating timing constraints into this process, we also gain insight into the usability of our system in real cooperative scenarios.

Collaborative work is characterized by frequently changing situations and corresponding demands for tool support and interaction behavior provided by the collaboration environment. Current approaches to address these changing demands include manual tailoring by end-users and automatic adaptation of single user tools or for individual users. Few systems use context as a basis for adapting collaborative work environments, mostly focusing on document recommendation and awareness provision. In this paper, we present, firstly, a generic four layer framework for modeling and exploiting context. Secondly, a generic adaptation process translating user activity into state, deriving context for a given focus, and executing adaptation rules on this context. Thirdly, a collaboration domain model for describing collaboration environments and collaborative situations. Fourthly, examples of exploiting our approach to support context-based adaptation in four typical collaboration situations: co-location, co-access, co-recommendation, and co-dependency.

In this paper, we propose a software architecture based on Web services and Software agents for groupware tailorability. Through our literature study, we realize that the property of tailorability has a significant impact on designing collaborative applications. Although online applications in the recent years have been growing exponentially, online collaborative work between users is often supported by software applications that provide static basic functionalities, mostly centered on communication tools (text, audio and video). Hence, adding more sophisticated tools for enriching the collaborative experience, as for example, an integrated environment for task coordination and production, requires manually coding them into the application, which requires a significant effort in order to adapt the system to the real needs of users. In a collaborative context, the application designers are not able to predict all users' needs at design time. To remedy this problem, we propose a tailorable groupware architecture that enables the dynamic integration/composition of services into the collaborative application, gaining both in time and performance. Our work is based on the 3C functional model by Ellis that decomposes collaboration between users into communication, coordination and cooperation spaces. Through our research, we realized that Web services are powerful distributed components offering the desired tools to adapt a groupware to the real needs of users. In this paper, we propose a collaboration protocol based on Web services between machines over the network in order to exchange common services. Based on this protocol, we propose our groupware architecture, U3D, that introduces tailorability in collaboration applications.

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) also known as business process management systems (BPMSs) are increasingly popular in today’s large organizations. In spite of this popularity, many processes are still supported by ad hoc systems based, for example, on spreadsheets and homegrown databases. In particular, there is a lack of flexible process automation approaches that are able to bridge the gap between these ad hoc solutions and large-scale systems. This paper reports on a flexible WfMS and approach that blends formal and informal workflow modeling and execution, thus supporting different types of processes. We validate our work by discussing its design and implementation, and by analyzing its use in four different use cases within Siemens business units. We also discuss the role of action items as important flexibility mechanisms behind our model. Showing its ability to handle exceptions and ad hoc workflows.