Information sharing in collaborative environments

Abstract

In the 80ties, the personal computing paradigm has fundamentally changed the way people work within organizations. The nineties will see a similar revolution - workgroup computing. This term describes IT support of work groups in the context of complex, interdisciplinary tasks in geographically dispersed organizations. Efficient information sharing is the key to effective collaboration support. In the context of typical collaborative environments however, (geographically dispersed, mobile and location independent sites, independent component failures, concurrent activities) building applications which support information sharing between separated and autonomous operating users is extremely difficult. This paper describes an infrastructure which addresses these issues by providing the abstraction of a shared information space and in this context offers a variety of collaboration specific consistency models and coordination mechanisms.