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Real time groupware as a distributed system: concurrency control and its effect on the interface

Published: 22 October 1994 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    This paper exposes the concurrency control problem in groupware when it is implemented as a distributed system. Traditional concurrency control methods cannot be applied directly to groupware because system interactions include people as well as computers. Methods, such as locking, serialization, and their degree of optimism, are shown to have quite different impacts on the interface and how operations are displayed and perceived by group members. The paper considers both human and technical considerations that designers should ponder before choosing a particular concurrency control method. It also reviews our work-in-progress designing and implementing a library of concurrency schemes in GROUPKIT, a groupware toolkit.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CSCW '94: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
        October 1994
        464 pages
        ISBN:0897916891
        DOI:10.1145/192844
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 22 October 1994

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        Author Tags

        1. computer supported cooperative work
        2. concurrency control algorithms
        3. distributed systems
        4. real time groupware

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        CSCW94
        CSCW94: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 94
        October 22 - 26, 1994
        North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

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        CSCW '94 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 200 submissions, 21%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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