Proceedings Of The Sixth International Conference On Computer Supported Cooperative Work In Design

Computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) is a research area that aims at integrating the works of several people involved in a common goal, inside a co-operative universe, through the sharing of resources in an efficient way. This report contains the papers presented at a conference on CSCW in design. Topics covered include: techniques, methods, and tools for CSCW in design; social organization of the CSCW process; integration of methods & tools within the work organization; co-operation in virtual enterprises and electronic businesses; CSCW in design & manufacturing; interaction between the CSCW approach and knowledge reuse as found in knowledge management; intelligent agent & multi-agent systems; Internet/World Wide Web and CSCW in design; and applications & test beds.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2006, held in Nanjing, China in May 2006. Among topics covered are CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, Web services, knowledge management, security and privacy in CSCW systems, workflow management, and e-learning.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2007, held in Melbourne, Australia, in April 2007. This book, as the fourth volume of its series on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Design, includes 60 articles that are the expanded versions of the papers presented at CSCWD 2007. The book is organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, agents and multi-agent systems, Web services, Semantic Web, and Grid computing, knowledge management, security, privacy, and trust in CSCW systems, workflow management, e-learning, and other applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005. The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement.

Improvements in computer networking have heralded great expectations for computer-mediated distributed work. However, experience has revealed that, as information flow improves, a central problem for distributed workers is the administration, management and control of that information. Research into Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) investigates design methods and technologies for the support of collaboration, communication and coordination of distributed group work, both within and among organizations. In tandem with this focus on the support of distributed communication and collaboration, there have been exciting developments in the fields of Intelligent Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), notably in the concepts, theories and deployment of intelligent agents as a means of distributing computer-based problem solving expertise. The paradigm of multi-agent systems forms a proposed basis for the design of CSCW architectures, the support of CSCW operations and for addressing some of the problems of cooperative working. The application of a multi-agent approach to CSCW makes information exchange among the participants easier by delivering support to the participants, assisting workflows and procedures, and providing convenient user interfaces to CSCW systems. Furthermore, the ideas inherent in such an approach are also applicable to other domains, such as support for interactive learning. Organizations that seek to exploit the advantages offered through CSCW will benefit from the integration of agents in the management and use of their corporate knowledge, especially with the advancement of wired or wireless networking, pervasive computing, and other information technologies. Agent Supported Cooperative Work describes the state of the art in this exciting new area, covering both theoretical foundations and practical applications of ASCW. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to ASCW, bringing together contributions from international experts in the field.