Data Management Issues and Trade-Offs 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 difficult data management issues in designing systems for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Specifically, 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 significant gap remains in addressing the requirements of such systems and where designers have to make design trade-offs that can be difficult to evaluate. Finally, we discuss several open issues for future work.