Lehrgebiet Informationssysteme

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(C) AG DBIS

GROUP-AUTHORING IN CONCORD - A DB-BASED APPROACH

Norbert Ritter

University of Kaiserslautern, Department of Computer Science
P.O.Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
e-mail: ritter@informatik.uni-kl.de

Full paper (postscript version, compressed by gzip or PDF version )

Abstract

CONCORD provides processing support for concurrent design/engineering. As an extension of the well known transaction paradigm used in database systems, design transactions, design-flows as well as cooperation between designers are supported. In this paper, we argue that group authoring and group editing can also be supported by CONCORD; a corresponding group editor will be presented. We show that the isolation property of conventional transactions is not inherently contradictory to cooperation. Due to consistency reasons, isolation is still necessary (at lower levels) and, therefore, can be considered as the foundation of cooperation, provided activities are adequately structured and suitable mechanisms are used to enforce isolation. Our group editor CGE proves that both, adequate working in the text document (in the sense that the processing principles visible at the interface fit into the user's mental model) as well as adequate cooperation (in the sense that users may exchange intermediate results) can be reached under exploitation of isolated transactions as a basic means.

in: Proc.12th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'97), San Jose, CA., Feb. 1997, pp. 158-165