Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications

the long version

Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications integrates Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) Technologies by first presenting a rigorous analysis of requirements presented by diverse classes of cooperative applications, ranging from cooperative authoring, through design for manufacturing, to interorganizational workflows, and then goes on to introduce a language that is suitable for the specification of cooperative activities. This language is based on a formal model and provides a collection of tools that allow the users to reason about the correctness of specifications, rather than relying on mechanisms that detect possible violations at run-time. The transaction model introduced in this monograph combines the use of private work spaces that allow individual participants to work independently, with synchronization mechanisms that allow them to combine their work to form a coherent whole. Finally, this monograph shows how the new transactional concepts developed in the project can be mapped into the transaction manager of an object-oriented database management system to provide a clean and efficient implementation. Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications summarizes the state of the art of key technologies in cooperative activities and transactions. This book will be extremely useful to students, researchers, and technology developers in the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) Technologies, and is suitable as a text or reference for a graduate-level course on Database Systems or Computer Supported Cooperative Work.