Abstract
Collaborative systems supporting coupled work scenarios by audio/video conferencing, application sharing, or electronic mail have found their acceptance in many domains. Going beyond these systems, user groups require cooperation support also for decoupled work in environments with mobile and location-independent sites. Support of different modifications made to replicated common data on each decoupled site is necessary to guarantee flexible and unrestricted decoupled work. This mostly implies inconsistencies and hence different versions of replicated data which must be unified during a reintegration phase. This paper defines requirements for an efficient and flexible reintegration, and it compares existing reintegration mechanisms with these requirements. In its central part, the paper presents a generic Merge And Resolve Conflicts (MARC) component which provides history based automatic conflict detection and semi-automatic resolution on object nets. An implementation of this component extends the CoNus CSCW system by Siemens Corporate Technology with functionality supporting autonomous work and subsequent reintegration.
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Berger, M., Schill, A., Völksen, G. (1998). Supporting autonomous work and reintegration in collaborative systems. In: Conen, W., Neumann, G. (eds) Coordination Technology for Collaborative Applications. ASIAN 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1364. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027106
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027106
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