The availability of global information infrastructure has led to a rapid growth in opportunities to perform joint work in locally distributed environments and within virtual organisations. This requires the support of human interaction in cooperative working environments at a computing system level, and via conventional means, such as personal interaction, phone and mail. Cooperation technology is therefore a core part of the vision of the institute to build informing organisms. Acquiring information and enrichment of information is not possible in isolation.
Different agents have to interact to benefit from the activities of others.
These interactions involve aspects, such as multi-user cooperation on shared documents, support for long duration activities, or interactive user control. At the same time, basic consistency requirements need to be ensured. Ensuring consistency of data in multi-user environments is the classical problem of transaction management. However, in order to support cooperation, the traditional paradigm of competition for resources needs to be replaced by the paradigm of semantically correct exchange and sharing of information. The goal of this project has therefore been the development of a cooperative transaction management scheme and a corresponding specification language allowing multiple users to work in a cooperative fashion but still providing transactional execution guarantees.