Many large-scale distributed applications rely on collaboration, where unrelated users or organizations share their resources for everyone's benefit. However, in such environments any node may attempt to maximize its own benefit by exploiting other's resources without contributing back. Collaborative systems must therefore deploy strategies to fight free-riders, and enforce collaborative behavi...

This paper and presentation describe theoretical and empirical foundations of an ongoing research and development effort to create a virtual reality environment in which students cohabitate, collaborate, and co-construct shared meanings of astronomical phenomena in an undergraduate introductory astronomy course. Initial versions of this environment addressed face-to-face and asynchronous method...

Instant messaging applications that convey presence awareness are quickly becoming some of the most popular groupware applications. They support lightweight and intermittent interactions that allow users to qiiickly move between a personal and a collective space, thus blurring the traditional distinction behveen synchronous and asynchronous systems. 'Often, however, the focus of collaboration i...

The Arizona Health Sciences Library has collaborated with clinical faculty to develop a federated search engine that is useful for meeting real-time clinical information needs. This article proposes a technology mediation role for the reference librarian that was inspired by the project, and describes the collaborative model used for developing technology-mediated services for targeted users.

In this paper we propose a framework for modelling asynchronous collaboration. Drawing on arguments that a taskbased approach is inappropriate for the analysis collaborative work we model collaboration in terms of the artefacts, users, and information flow involved. We illustrate the framework's potential through studies of shared care of diabetic patients, and discuss the implications of this ...

In our terminology, a “deliberation” is a distributed collaborative process, more or less spontaneous, structured, and complex. This process can include both individual and collective activities, synchronous and asynchronous phases. But in every case, its core part is the negotiation of some result through argumentation. This paper describes a comprehensive flexible generic support for distribu...

We describe a prototype CSCW infrastructure at the core of a multiuser distributed and collaborative scientiic manipulation environment which we have implemented on the multimedia desktop. This application conferencing substrate facilitates user level cooperation and supports many modes of asynchronous and synchronous multiple-user interaction. We demonstrate how the communication and collabora...

Collaborative ontology engineering enables the creation of large complex ontologies. However, few projects successfully perform such multi-user ontology modeling. This paper gives an overview of ten different ontology engineering projects’ infrastructure, architecture and workflows. It especially focuses on issues regarding collaborative ontology modeling. The survey leads on to a discussion of...