Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications

Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. The very term {\em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange between cooperating (human) participants. In contrast, traditional transaction technologies allow concurrent users to operate on shared data, while providing them with the illusion of complete isolation from each other. To overcome this contradiction, the TRANSCOOP researchers had to come up with a new and original notion of correctness of concurrent executions, based on controlled exchange of information between concurrent users. Merging histories in accordance with prespecified commutativity rules among concurrent operations provides transactional guarantees to activities such as cooperative designing, which until now had to be carried out sequentially. As an interesting consequence, it also provides a basis for management of consistency between disconnected or mobile users who operate independently and yet, must occasionally reconcile their work with each other.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 TransCoop Objectives.- 1.3 Application RequirementsThe Driving Force Behind the Scene.- 1.4 Specification Language for Cooperative Transactions.- 1.5 Cooperative Transaction Model.- 1.6 Roots and Background of the Project.- 1.7 Outline of the Book.- 2 The Transcoop Paradigm.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Motivation.- 2.3 Methodology Applied.- 2.4 Technical Prerequisites.- 2.5 Terminology and Central Notions.- 2.6 Positioning TransCoop Within the CSCW Field.- 3 Transaction Models in Cooperative Work An Overview.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 a Brief History of the Term Transaction Model.- 3.3 Main Techniques to Implement the ACID Properties.- 3.4 Generalizing ACID.- 3.5 Advanced Transaction Models.- 3.6 What is a Transaction Model, What is a Transactional Framework?.- 4 Application Requirements.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Requirements from Workflow.- 4.3 Requirements from Design for Manufacturing.- 4.4 Requirements from Cooperative Document Authoring.- 4.5 Consolidated Requirements.- 5 the TransCoop Architecture.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 the TransCoop Reference Architecture.- 5.3 Comparison to Related Work.- 5.4 Implementation Choices and Discussion.- 6 the Transcoop Specification Environment.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 Requirements.- 6.3 a Cooperative Specification Language Paradigm.- 6.4 Example Cooperative Scenario.- 6.5 Definition of Organizational Aspects.- 6.6 Definition of Transactional Aspects.- 6.7 Integration of Organizational and Transactional Aspects.- 6.8 the CoCoA Language.- 6.9 Reflections on the Formal Model of CoCoA.- 6.10 the CoCoA Tool Set.- 6.11 Related Work.- 6.12 Discussion 140 Appendix: the CoCoA Syntax.- 7 the TransCoop Transaction Model.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Overview of the CoAct Model.- 7.3 Cooperative Activities.-7.4 Running Example.- 7.5 a Formal Model of History Merging.- 7.6 Discussion of Other Relations in the Context of CoAct.- 7.7 Summary.- 8 the TransCoop Demonstrator System.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 Overview.- 8.3 the Demonstrator Application.- 8.4 the Specification Environment.- 8.5 the Runtime Environment.- 8.6 Summary.- 9 Conclusions.- 9.1 Reflections on the Cooperative Transaction Model.- 9.2 Implementation of Concepts.- 9.3 Critical Assessment.- 9.4 Extensions to the Specification Environment.- 9.5 Lessons for Transaction Management Research and Development.- References.