Support for information sharing in CSCW based on causally and totally ordered group communication

Abstract

In the context of typical CSCW environments (geographically dispersed, mobile hosts, component failures, concurrent activities) applications which help to overcome the limitations of space and time in collaborative work are extremely difficult to build. The major source of complexity lies in implementing mechanisms for access, manipulation and consistency of shared information. These mechanisms however are fundamental to a wide variety of CSCW applications. COCOON is an object-oriented application framework, which addresses these issues. It provides the abstraction of a shared information space which supports the interaction of members in a collaborative session. In this context COCOON offers a variety of CSCW specific information modelling, interaction and consistency mechanisms built upon the paradigm of causally and totally ordered communcation (CATOC). A major focus is the support for autonomous work, where team members disconnected from the session can alter information and later rejoin by merging their changes with the changes occured in the session in a consistent way.