Vector-Field Consistency for Cooperative1 Work

Although cooperative work is widely used in a daily basis, nonetheless cooperative work tools are not being used as their potential would suggest. Even though the reasons behind this fact are not completely clear, the truth is that users see current cooperative work tools as a burden to their working activities. To work around this problem, the notion of localityawareness can be extremely helpful. Additionally, if we adapt consistency models to the cooperative activities being performed by each individual user, then we will be able to improve their experience without compromising the overall application performance. For example, we can decide which updates each user is most interested in and which ones he should be unaware of. The VFC algorithm does just that but in the environment of ad-hoc gaming. We propose VFC for Cooperative Work (VFC4CW), an adaptation of the original VFC consistency model to the environment of cooperative work, namely document-based cooperative work. In this work, we first study the state of the art of consistency maintenance in cooperative work tools. Then we propose an architecture which combines a generic VFC4CW middleware layer with a cooperative work application. At last, we discuss how to evaluate a future implementation of the proposed architecture.