Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
corre sponds to each work group. Users can belong to one or more work groups,
namely, workspaces. To join a workspace, users have to pass password
authentication. Basically, a workspace is a repository of various types of files. In
BSCW, users in the same workspace can have different access levels. This mechanism
is realized by providing a per-object access control model. A notion of a
bag
supports
migration of data among various workspaces. Bag is a personal repository and
users always have access to their own bags to copy or move data among workspaces.
Bag is regarded as a simple function to support personal work in BSCW.
TeamWave is a typical groupware system based on TeamRooms
8)
using a room
model
9)
. The room model of TeamWave provides persistent
places
for collaboration
as opposed to the temporal meetings provided by the meeting-centered models of
many conventional real-time groupware systems. The notion of place provides
features of physical rooms of the real world. Physical team rooms have various
characteristics suited to collaboration. The room model simulates the characteristics
on the networked computing environment. Rooms organize persistent workspaces
for users containing documents and various tools. Rooms and their contents are
fully persistent. Thus the model is able to support both real-time and asynchronous
cooperative work. Multiple rooms are able to exist in a system and each room
represents one kind of work. Users can move to other rooms easily to change their
work. Team Wave integrates individual and group work and does not distinguish
individual and group workspace. Rooms are able to be used for both individual
and group work. Thus a transition between both types of work corresponds to a
movement between rooms.
CBE (Collaboratory Builder's Environment)
10,
11)
, also based on the room model,
is a groupware system implemented in the Java language. Users of CBE can utilize
the system through WWW browsers. CBE supports both personal work and group
work simultaneously. Users can switch their work style smoothly. The basic unit
of workspace in CBE is a
room
. The main purpose of rooms of CBE is providing
workspace for cooperation and storage of data. Multiple rooms in CBE represent
multiple work going on concurrently. Each workspace in CBE is able to define the
roles of users. The roles are classified into four types:
Administrators, Members,
Observers,
and
Restricted
. The notion of roles in CBE only represents the authority
of users in each room. We think the roles of CBE are less expressive than those of
the environment model.
The WORLDS project at DSTC (Distributed Systems Technology Centre) in
Australia have developed Orbit, which is a system based on the
locale
framework
12)
.
Locales, defined as places for groups working in various social worlds, are able to
be regarded as a unit of workspace in Orbit. One social world corresponds to one
locale and users can belong to one or more locales. A locale is a repository of data
or tools for cooperative work. A user who belongs to some locales has an
individual
view
that consists of tools and data selected from those locales. Thus individual
views generally differ from each other even if users belong to exactly the same
locales. This mechanism provides users who belong to one or more social worlds
with an integrated view.
