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Concurrency control has always been one of the most important issues in the design of synchronous groupware systems with fully-replicated architecture. An ideal strategy should be able to support natural and flexible human-to-computer and human-to-human interactions while maintaining the consistency of the system. This paper summarizes previous researches on this topic and points out the deficiencies of the existing results. A novel semantics-based concurrency control framework,oodOPT, is proposed. The main idea of the framework is to resolve conflicts by utilizing semantics of the operations and the accessed data objects. With this approach, complexities in concurrency control are shifted completely from application developers to the framework. Conflicts among operations on objects with different semantics and the strategies resolving these conflicts are analyzed. After describing the algorithm in full detail, the discussion ends up with a comparison with other related work and some considerations for open problems.

As research and development on CSCW advance rapidly, there is an increasing need for a general purpose platform based on which various types of CSCW applications can be developed. The platform should provide not only necessary services that minimize development efforts, but also sufficient flexibility for the construction of applications. This paper describes DICSE, a platform providing data management services based on the characteristics of data flow in CSCW systems, detailing its underlying cooperative work model, the services, the architecture and some considerations for the implementation.

Workflow management systems can help business goals to be achieved with high efficiency by means of sequencing work activities and invoking appropriate human and/or information resources associated with these activities. As computer networks are used more and more widely in daily work, workflow management attracts more and more attention from both industry and research communities. This paper summarizes the state of art in WfMS research, detailing some workflow-related concepts and its typologies, the WfMS reference model proposed by WfMC, and some of the current research trends and hotspots.

Workflow management systems provide an ideal environment and a set of tools for enterprise-wide cooperation by automating business processes. An intelligent workflow management system should have the ability to analyze and re-engineer workflow process to improve performance and efficiency. There are two possible ways to do this: technology-based re-engineering and re-engineering based on relations between people or organizations. The latter forms the basic topics of business process re-engineering (BPR). This paper discusses workflow process re-engineering (WPR), which focuses on static analyzing of data flow and control flow of workflow definitions for process optimizing, so that system performance and cooperation efficiency can be improved while original intentions and executing results of the optimized process remain unchanged.

As the Internet/intranet/WWW technologies become more and more mature and Web-based applications become richer and richer, we are provided with an ideal computing environment to construct workflow management systems (WfMSs). Web-based WfMSs can help business goals to be achieved effectively by means of integrating various distributed resources and applications and coordinating work activities in an easy to access environment. This paper describes a Web-based general purpose workflow management system named Wowww!, detailing its architecture, the workflow engine, the workflow model and the algorithms used for workflow instance execution. Other features and some considerations for future work are also discussed.