Transaction support for cooperative work: An overview of the TransCoop Project

Cooperative work on shared information requires different kinds of computing system support to coordinate the work of multiple users, to establish mutual awareness among users, and to ensure the consistency of user results. These issues are currently tackled separately in various loosely related areas, such as workflow systems, groupware, and advanced transactional models. In the TRANSCOOP project, we have developed a transaction model and a specification language that provide a core functionality for information sharing in cooperative systems. The core functionality includes explicit work coordination facilities, which at the same time ensure the consistency of results. The TRANSCOOP transaction model and specification language have evolved from a requirements analysis of various cooperative application scenarios. The transaction
model has been implemented as an extension of an existing object-oriented database management system. The suitability of both the transaction model and the specification language to describe cooperative scenarios is being evaluated for a cooperative document authoring application.