Abstract
Developing a collaboration solution, that scales to an entire organization, that offers an integrated collection of cooperation tools, that is general enough to address a large range of applications, and that is easy to deploy for most people, is still an open challenge. This paper presents ToxicFarm services that are an integral part of a framework for hosting Internet virtual teams. The originality of this work is in providing a synthesis between contributions from different domains, including version management in software engineering, process management in data engineering, and awareness in groupware tools. The paper describes the overall services offered, discusses design choices for their integration and implementation, presents relations with existing work and describes their use in several emerging e-business application domains, such as e-finance, e-learning and e-telecom.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
D. Baker, D. Georgakopoulos, H. Schuster, and A. Cichocki, “Awareness provisioning in collaboration management,” International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, vol. 11, nos. 1/2, pp. 145-173, 2002.
B. Berliner, “CVS II: Parallelizing software development,” in Proceedings of USENIX, Washigton, DC, 1990.
J. Bitcheva, O. Perrin, and C. Godart, “Cooperative process coordination,” in The 2003 International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'03), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2003.
A. Bouazza, H. Skaf-Molli, and P. Molli, “Coordinating virtual teams by measuring group divergence,” in Workshop on Groupware related Task Design at GROUP'99 Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 1999.
BSCW, “BSCW,” 2003, Online u http://bscw.gmd.de.
F. Buschmann, R. Meunier, H. Rohnert, P. Sommerlad, and M. Stal, Pattern Oriented Software Architecture: A System of Patterns. John Wiley & Son Ltd., 1996.
G. Canals, C. Godart, P. Molli, and M. Munier, “A criterion to enforce correctness of indirectly cooperating applications,” Information Sciences, vol. 110, nos. 3/4, pp. 279-302, 1998.
R. Conradi and B. Westfechtel, “Version models for software configuration management,” ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 30, no. 2, 1998.
P. Dourish, “The parting of the ways: Divergence, data management and collaborative work,” in Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer-Supported CooperativeWork, CSCW Mechanisms II, 1995, pp. 215-230.
P. Dourish, “Using metalevel techniques in a flexible toolkit for cscw applications,” ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 109-155, 1998.
C.A. Ellis and S.J. Gibbs, “Concurrency control in groupware systems,” in SIGMOD Conference, 1989, vol. 18, pp. 399-407.
P.H. Feiler and G.F. Downey, “Transaction-oriented configuration management: A case study. Technical Report CMU/SEI-90-TR-23 ESD-90/TR-224, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, 1990.
C. Godart, C. Bouthier, P. Canalda, F. Charoy, P. Molli, O. Perrin, H. Saliou, J.-C. Bignon, G. Halin, and O. Malcurat, “Asynchronous coordination of virtual teams in creative applications (co-design or co-engineering): Requirements and design criteria,” in Information Technologies for Virtual Enterprises, 2001.
C. Godart, G. Halin, J.-C. Bignon, C. Bouthier, P. Malcurat, and P. Molli, “Implicit or explicit coordination of virtual teams in building design,” in Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA'01), Sydney, Australia, 2001.
C. Godart, O. Perrin, and H. Skaf, “Coo: A workflow operator to improve cooperation modeling in virtual enterprises,” in 9th IEEE International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering Information Technology for Virtual Enterprises (RIDE-VE'99), 1999.
S. Greenberg and M. Roseman, Groupware Toolkits for Synchronous Work. John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 1999.
D. Grigori, F. Charoy, and C. Godart, “Flexible data management and execution to support cooperative workflow: The COO approach,” in CODAS, 2001.
C. Gutwin, “Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Distributed Groupware.” PhD thesis, University of Calgary, 1997.
A. Haake and J. M. Haake, “Take cover: Exploiting version support in cooperative systems,” in Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press: New York, 1993, pp. 406-413.
J.C. Hautecouverture, N. Grégory, F. Charoy, M. Patten, and I. Faugeras, “Coopera: Analyse de l'usage d'une plateforme de cooperation ´a l'usage des enfants,” in 14th Euro-Micro Conference on Human Centered Processes, Luxembourg, 2003.
A. Imine, P. Molli, G. Oster, and M. Rusinowitch, “Proving correctness of transformation functions in realtime groupware,” in 8th European Conference on Computer-Supported CooperativeWork, Helsinki, Finlande, 2003.
Jabber, “Jabber: An open XML-based presence and instant messaging,” 2003, Online http://www.jabber.org.
D.J.L.T. Kaoru Ishikawa, What Is Total Quality Control?: The JapaneseWay (Business Management). Prentice Hall Trade, 1985.
Lotus, “Lotus notes and domino,” 2003, Online http://www.lotus.com/.
P. Molli, G. Oster, H. Skaf-Molli, and A. Imine, “Using the transformational approach to build a safe and generic data synchronizer,” in GROUP 2003 Conference, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, 2003.
P. Molli, H. Skaf-Molli, and C. Bouthier, “State treemap: An awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware,” in 7th International Workshop on Groupware-CRIWG'2001, Darmstadt, Germany, 2001.
P. Molli, H. Skaf-Molli, and G. Oster, “Divergence awareness for virtuel team through the web,” in International Conference on Integrating Design and Process Technology (IDPT'02), 2002.
MySQL, MySQL, 2003, Online http://www.mysql.com.
NetMeeting, Netmeeting, 2003, Online http://www.microsoft.com/netmeeting.
O. Perrin, F. Wynen, J. Bitcheva, and C. Godart, “A model to support collaborative work in virtual enterprises,” in Business Process Management (BPM'2003), W.M.P. van der Aalst, A.H.M. ter Hofstede, and M. Weske (Eds.), vol. 2678 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2003, pp. 104-119.
PHP, PHP, 2003, Online http://www.php.net.
H. Schuster, D. Baker, A. Cichocki, D. Georgakopoulos, and M. Rusinkiewicz, “The collaboration management infrastructure,” in 16th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), San Diego: California, USA, 2000, p. 677.
SOAP, SOAP: Simple object access protocol, 2003, Online http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP.
SourceForge, SourceForge.net: Breaking down the barriers to open source development, 2003, Online http://www.sourceforge.net.
SSL, SSL: Secure sockets layer, 2003. Online http://home.netscape.com/security/techbriefs/ssl.html.
WfMC, WfMC: Workflow management coalition, 2003. Online http://wfmc.org.
XSLT, XML/XSLT, 2003. Online http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Godart, C., Molli, P., Oster, G. et al. The ToxicFarm Integrated Cooperation Framework for Virtual Teams. Distributed and Parallel Databases 15, 67–88 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:DAPD.0000009432.79864.08
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:DAPD.0000009432.79864.08