Transaction Models Supporting Cooperative Work - The TransCoop Experiences

Cooperative work on shared information requires different kind of computing system support to coordinate the work of multiple users, to establish mutual awareness and to ensure consistency. These issues are currently tackled separately in various loosely related areas, like workflow systems, groupware, and advanced transactional models. We present a transactional model that provides a core functionality for information sharing in cooperative systems, that explicitely supports cooperation primitives and at the same time ensures consistency of results. The model has been derived from a thorough analysis of various cooperative appliciation scenarios. It is currently being implemented as an extension of an object-oriented database management system and evaluated for a cooperative document authoring application.