Data Management Issues and Tradeo s 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 di cult data management issues in designing systems for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Speci cally, 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 signi cant gap remains in addressing the requirements of such systems and where designers have to make design tradeo s that can be di cult to evaluate. Finally, we discuss several open issues for future work.