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 ComputerSupported Cooperative Work.

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibility of interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these collections. As a consequence, many efforts are devoted to improve the quality of the interaction between users and databases. Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are a promising interaction paradigm particularly suited to novice and/or occasional users. The users are facilitated in the database navigation since the system proposes them an environment that reproduces a real situation and gives the possibility of interacting by manipulating objects that have a direct correspondence with known objects.

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.

Conventional object-oriented data models are closed: although they allow users to define application-specific classes, they usually come with a fixed set of modelling primitives. This constitutes a major problem, as different application domains, e.g. database integration or multimedia, need special support.
Using an extended metaclass concept, this book provides for the solution of this problem a simple but extendible open object-oriented data model, a so-called RISC model. By introducing the basic concepts of the open object-oriented database management system VODAK, it demonstrates how the extended metaclass concept can be integrated homogeneously into object-oriented data models.