Virtual states and transitions, virtual sessions and collaboration

Abstract

A key feature of collaboration is having a log of what and how is being done - for private use/reuse and for sharing selected parts with collaborators in today's complex, large scale scientific/software environments. Even better if this log is automatic, created on the fly while a scientist or software developer is working in a habitual way, without the need for extra efforts. The CAVES (Collaborative Analysis Versioning Environment System) and CODESH (COllaborative DEvelopment SHell) projects address this problem in a novel way, building on the concepts of virtual state and virtual transition to provide an automatic persistent logbook for sessions of data analysis or software development in a collaborating group. Repositories of sessions can be configured dynamically to record and make available in a controlled way the knowledge accumulated in the course of a scientific or software endeavor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.