Groupware and the World Wide Web

144 Pages·1997·6.542 MB·English

by  Richard Bentley, Thilo Horstmann, Jonathan Trevor (auth.), Richard Bentley, Uwe Busbach, David Kerr, Klaas Sikkel (eds.)

Groupware and the World Wide Web
Edited by
Richard Bentley, Uwe Busbach,
David Kerr & Klaas Sikkel
German National Research Center for Information Technology,
Institutefor Applied Information Technology (GMD-FIT), 53754 Sankt-Augustin, Germany
Reprinted from Computer Supported Cooperative Work:
The Joumal of Collaborative Computing
Volume 6, Nos. 2-3,1997
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-6428-6 ISBN 978-94-011-5756-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5756-8
Printed on acid-free paper
AlI Rights Reserved
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1997
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Contents
RICHARD BENTLEY, UWE BUSBACH, DAVID KERR & KLAAS SIKKEL
/ Preface v
RICHARD BENTLEY, THILO HORSTMANN & JONATHAN TREVOR /
The World Wide Web as Enabling Technology for CSCW: The Case of
BSCW 1
ALAN DIX / Challenges and Perspectives for Cooperative Work on the Web:
An Analytical Approach 25
MANUEL ROMERO SALCEDO & DOMINIQUE DECOUCHANT / Struc-
tured Cooperative Authoring for the World Wide Web 47
ANTONIETTA GRASSO, JEAN-LUC MEUNIER, DANIELE PAGANI &
REMO PARESCHI / Distributed Coordination and Workflow on the
World Wide Web 65
MARK GINSBURG & KATHERINE DULmA / Enterprise-Level Groupware
Choices: Evaluating Lotus Notes and Intranet-Based Solutions 91
RODGER LEA, YASUAKI HONDA & KOUICHI MATSUDA / Virtual Soci-
ety: Collaboration in 3D Spaces on the Internet 117
Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6: v-vi, 1997. V
Preface
The World Wide Web hardly needs an introduction. Originally designed as an
infrastructure to improve the accessibility of scientific data, the Web existed for
several years before drawing general attention. The subsequent rapid growth began
with the emergence of Web browser programs which were easy to use and to obtain.
Although much of the functionality already existed - viz., document retrieval from
remote computers over the Internet - the browser interface, indexing and search
facilities offered by the Web have changed the usage and the nature of the Internet.
The scope and accessibility of available information make the Web an entirely
novel tool.
The rise of the World Wide Web poses a number of questions to the CSCW
community. In what ways does the Web, as it exists now, facilitate cooperation
over the Internet or a corporate intranet? What are the factors that made the Web
such a success? How can Web technology contribute to the construction of CSCW
applications? Which adaptations and extensions to the Web would be needed in
order to make it a platform better suited fOF the needs of cooperative work, or the
creation and deployment of CSCW systems?
The state of the art is extremely volatile and developments in this area continue at
rapid pace. Today's prototypes and systems are likely to be obsolete tomorrow. The
designers of tomorrow's systems can learn from the design decisions, rationales
and problems involved in today's systems, and for that reason alone a special issue
on CSCW and the Web is worthy of publication. But, even though there is some
emphasis on the technological aspects, this issue is aimed at a wider audience. The
six articles here discuss the possibilities, problems and perspectives for CSCW
on the World Wide Web from very different points of view. As a collection, this
special issue is a good introduction to the relevant issues and, as such, worth more
than the sum of its parts.
The event that triggered the genesis of this special issue was a workshop on
'CSCW and the Web' held at GMD in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in February
1996.* At this gathering, organised by the ERCIM World Wide Web Working
Group (W4G) and GMD, a number of researchers presented Web-related CSCW
systems ranging from simple tools that have been successfully employed to grand
visions yet to be realised. We invited authors of some of the papers presented at
the workshop to submit their work to this special issue and, in order to broaden the
scope, we invited other research groups working in this area but not represented at
* CSCW and the Web: Proceedings of the 5th ERCIM/W4G Workshop, GMD Work
ing Paper 984, available from GMD-FJT, Sankt Augustin, D-53754 Germany or online at:
http://orgwis.gmd.de/w4G/proc.html
vi PREFACE
the workshop to submit a paper. All the papers submitted have been subjected to
the standard CSCW Journal review and revision process.
The first article of this special issue by Bentley et al. introduces the World
Wide Web and discusses its potential as an 'enabling technology for CSCW'.
This potential is illustrated with a description of the BSCW shared workspace
system to reveal possibilities and problems posed by the Web for CSCW system
developers. Even without such extension, however, the World Wide Web is already
a collaborative environment in a weak sense. In the second paper, Dix investigates
the reasons for the tremendous success of the Web and analyses its strengths and
weaknesses as a platform for cooperation.
The following two articles present systems that exploit the Web as an infrastruc
ture for CSCW applications. The Alliance system, presented by Romero and
Decouchant, is some of the most advanced work that has been carried out in the
area of collaborative authoring, and the authors discuss in detail the mechanisms
required to bring the Alliance system to the Web. Grasso et al. then present their
work with the WebFlow system which uses the Web as an interface and architecture
for supporting distributed workflows - an area gaining much attention following
the penetration of the Web into organisations in the guise of the corporate intranet.
The topic of the intranet is the focus of the paper by Ginsburg and Duliba, which
examines collaboration technologies from the perspective of (large) organisations.
Their perspective is the choice faced by IT management when looking to deploy
groupware tools, and in this case the choice between Lotus Notes and Web-based
intranet solutions. This choice is of crucial importance to a firm yet is an issue not
widely discussed in the CSCW community.
While the previous papers focus on the Web as a platform for CSCW in its
current form, the final paper of this special issue adopts a more visionary stance.
In describing their CommunityPlace system, Lea et al. examine the broadening
of the Web to encompass 3D multi-user worlds which provide rich environments
for cooperative work for widely-dispersed users. This well written and thought
provoking article shows how current work in the area of Virtual Reality, of great
interest to CSCW researchers, can be brought to the Internet and thus to a vastly
greater user group.
In finalising the content of this special issue a well-deserved word of thanks must
go to the 26 anonymous referees; their detailed and constructive critiques have led
to significant improvements in the quality of the papers, as readily acknowledged
by the papers' authors. Also we thank Kjeld Schmidt for providing us with the
opportunity to shape this issue and for much timely advice.
RICHARD BENTLEY
UWEBUSBACH
DAVID KERR
KLAAS SIKKEL
GMDFIT
Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6: 111-134, 1997. 111
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
The World Wide Web as Enabling Technology for
CSCW: The Case of BSCW
RICHARD BENTLEY, THILO HORSTMANN and JONATHAN TREVOR
CSCW Group, Institutefor Applied Information Technology (GMD FIT), German National
Research Centre for Computer Science, Schloj3 Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
E-mail: [email protected]
(Received 31 July 1996; in final fonn 29 November 1996)
Abstract. Despite the growth of interest in the field of CSCW, and the increasingly large number
of systems which have been developed, it is still the case that few systems have been adopted for
widespread use. This is particularly true for widely-dispersed, cross-organisational working groups
where problems of heterogeneity in computing hardware and software environments inhibit the
deployment of CSCW technologies. With a lightweight and extensible client-server architecture,
client implementations for all popular computing platfonns, and an existing user base numbered in
millions, the World Wide Web offers great potential in solving some of these problems to provide
an 'enabling technology' for CSCW applications. We illustrate this potential using our work with
the BSCW shared workspace system - an extension to the Web architecture which provides basic
facilities for collaborative infonnation sharing from unmodified Web browsers. We conclude that
despite limitations in the range of applications which can be directly supported, building on the
strengths of the Web can give significant benefits in easing the development and deployment of
CSCW applications.
Key words: World Wide Web, BSCW, enabling technologies, infonnation sharing
1. Introduction
Over the last decade the level of interest in the field of CSCW has grown enormously
and an ever-increasing number of systems have been developed with the goal of
supporting collaborative work. These efforts have led to a greater understanding of
the complexity of group work and the implications of this complexity, in terms of
the flexibility required of supporting computer systems, have driven much of the
recent work in the field. Despite these advances, however, it is still the case that
few cooperative systems are in widespread use and most exist only as laboratory
based prototypes. This is particularly true for widely-dispersed working groups,
where electronic mail and simple file-transfer programs remain the state-of-the-art
in providing computer support for collaborative work.
In this paper we examine the World Wide Web (Bemers-Lee et al., 1994) as a
technology for enabling development of more effective CSCW systems. The Web
provides a simple client-server architecture with client programs (browsers) imple
mented for all popular computing platforms and a central server component that
can be extended through a standard API. The Web has been extremely successful
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112 R. BENTLEY ET AL.
in providing a simple method for users to search, browse and retrieve information
as well as publish information of their own, but does not currently offer features for
more collaborative forms of information sharing such as joint document production.
There are a number of reasons to suggest the Web might be a suitable focus
for developers of CSCW systems. For widely-dispersed working groups, where
members may be in different organisations and different countries, issues of inte
gration and interoperability often make it difficult to deploy existing groupware
applications. Although non computer-based solutions such as telephone and video
conferencing technologies provide some support for collaboration, empirical evi
dence suggests that computer systems providing access to shared information, at
any time and place and using minimal technical infrastructure, are the main require
ment of groups collaborating in decentralised working environments (Rao, 1995;
Gorton et al., 1996). By offering an extensible centralised architecture and cross
platform browser implementations, increasingly deployed and integrated with user
environments, the Web may provide a means of introducing CSCW systems which
offer much richer support for collaboration than email and FTP, and thus serve as
an 'enabling technology' for CSCW.
In the following section we discuss the need for such enabling technologies for
CSCW to address problems of system development and deployment. We then give
an overview of the Web architecture and components and critically examine these
in the context of CSCW systems development. We suggest that the Web is limited
in the range of CSCW systems that can be developed on the basic architecture and,
in its current form, is most suited for asynchronous, centralised CSCW applications
with no strong requirements for notification, disconnected working and rich user
interfaces. We illustrate this with examples from our work with the BSCW shared
workspace system - an integrated set of cooperation tools offering basic facilities
for information sharing from unmodified Web browsers. We reveal benefits of
the Web as a platform for deploying such applications in real work domains, and
conclude with a discussion of some current developments which may ease the
limitations of the Web as a platform for system development and increase its utility
as an enabling technology for CSCW.
2. Moving out of the laboratory: The need for enabling technologies for
CSCW
Most of the CSCW systems which have been developed to date have been con
structed in laboratories as research prototypes. This is perhaps not surprising, as
CSCW systems place novel requirements on underlying technology such as dis
tributed systems and databases (Rodden et al., 1992), and many of the mechanisms
developed to support multi-user interaction do not address issues of cooperation
such as activity awareness and coordination. This has focused much attention on
the development of mechanisms to support floor management, user interface 'cou
pling', update propagation and so on, and has resulted in a range of experimental
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THE WORLD WIDE WEB AS ENABLING TECHNOLOGY FOR CSCW 113
systems tailored to the particular issues being investigated. The proprietary and
incompatible architectures on which many are based, the esoteric hardware and
software required and the lack of integration with existing application programs
and data formats inhibits deployment outside the laboratory and within the intended
application domain.
It might be argued that this situation is not unduly problematic; issues of sys
tem deployment are 'implementation concerns' and would be addressed by re
implementation of system prototypes. The lack of system deployment does, how
ever, pose a serious question to CSCW: if systems built to investigate particular
models or mechanisms are never deployed and evaluated in use, how can we deter
mine the effectiveness of these models and mechanisms in supporting cooperative
work? A central concern of CSCW is the need for systems which are sensitive to
their contexts of use, and a body of empirical data exists to show the problems
caused when systems are introduced which do not resonate with existing work
practice. When systems do not leave the research laboratory it is difficult to see
how the models and mechanisms they propose can be assessed other than from a
technical perspective.
Recent calls for CSCW systems to be designed so they can be evaluated in use
(Bannon, 1996) and for a more situated approach to system evaluation (Twidale
et aI., 1994) reflect this need to migrate CSCW systems out of the laboratory and
into the field if we are to eventually provide more effective systems. This migration
is far from trivial, as the diversity of machines, operating systems and application
software which characterises the real work domain is often far removed from the
homogeneity of the laboratory. This is particularly true for working groups which
cross departmental or organisational boundaries, where issues of integration and
interoperability mean it is extremely unlikely that systems developed as research
prototypes can be directly deployed. Adaptation or re-implementation of system
prototypes for deployment outside the laboratory is usually beyond the resources
of most research projects, suggesting that the issue of system deployment and the
attendant problems should not be tackled at the end of the prototype development,
but should be a central focus of the system design.
Developing CSCW systems that integrate smoothly with systems, applications
and data formats already in place in the work domain adds considerably to what is
already a complex design task. A number of researchers have pointed to the need
for tools to assist with the development of CSCW systems (e.g., Patterson, 1991;
Dewan and Choudhary, 1992), removing some of the complexity of user interface,
application and distributed systems programming which developers currently face.
Such 'enabling technologies' would ease problems of system development and
allow a more evolutionary approach - an approach otherwise prohibited by the
investment necessary to create system prototypes and the need to commit to policy
decisions at an early stage in a system's design. Work in CSCW is alreadyaddress
ing these issues through development of toolkits or application frameworks with
components which can be instantiated and combined to create groupware systems.
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114 R. BENTLEY ET AL.
Toolkits such as GroupKit (Roseman and Greenberg, 1995) are by now relatively
mature, and seem to reduce the complexity of CSCW system development in much
the same way that user interface toolkits allow rapid development of single-user
interfaces.
As we have shown, the desire for enabling technologies for CSCW lies not
only in easing problems of prototype construction but also facilitating deployment
and thereby evaluation of system prototypes in real work domains. As yet, most
CSCW toolkits focus primarily on system development and issues of cross-platform
deployment, integration with existing applications and so on are secondary. In this
regard more than any other the World Wide Web seems to offer potential as an
enabling technology for CSCW:
• Web client programs (browsers) are available for all popular computing plat
forms and operating systems, providing access to information in a platform
independent manner;
• browsers offer a simple user interface and consistent information presentation
across these platforms, and are themselves extensible through association of
external 'helper applications';
• browsers are already part of the computing environment in an increasing
number of organisations, requiring no additional installation or maintenance
of software for users to cooperate using the Web;
• many organisations have also installed their own Web servers as part of an
Internet presence or a corporate intranet and have familiarity with server
maintenance and, in many cases, server extension through programming the
server API.
As a basis for deployment of CSCW applications in real work domains, the level of
acceptance and penetration of Web technology in commercial and academic envi
ronments is grounds alone for suggesting that CSCW should pay serious attention
to the World Wide Web.
3. The Web as enabling technology for CSCW
[The Web] was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would
allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a
common project. (Berners-Lee et al., 1994, p. 76)
From its inception the Web was intended as a tool to support a richer, more active
form of information sharing than is currently the case. Early implementations at
CERN allowed the browsing of pages as is common today, but also supported
annotation of these pages and addition of links between arbitrary pages, not just
from pages on local servers the user can access and edit. Some of these concepts
were carried through to early drafts of the standards for Web protocols and archi
tecture which described features such as remote publishing of hypertext pages and
check infout support for locking documents to ensure consistency in a multi-author
environment. To date these aspects have largely been side-lined while development
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THE WORLD WIDE WEB AS ENABLING TECHNOLOGY FOR CSCW 115
of Web browsers, servers and protocols has focused on more 'passive' aspects of
information browsing. In this section we examine the Web as it currently exists
as a platform for developing and deploying CSCW technologies, following a brief
overview of the components on which it is based.
3.1. COMPONENTS OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB
The Web is based on a simple client-server architecture that allows clients to
request information from servers using a standard protocol called HTTP - the
HyperText Transfer Protocol.* Web browsers use a standard naming scheme (the
URL, or Uniform Resource Locator) to identify the particular information required
and send a HTTP Request for this information to the Web server running on the
machine on which this information is located. Access to information may be limited
to specific users or machines and, if the browser does not send this information as
part of the HTTP request, the server may have to request a valid user name and
password before returning the information.
Information may be stored on the server host machine in any format, and
the server must tell the client what format the requested information is so it can
handle it correctly. The server returns a HTTP Response consisting of a header
which identifies the type of data (its 'MIME-type') and a body which contains the
requested information. Depending on the capabilities of the browser the information
in the response body can be displayed directly (as with a GIF image for example) or
its processing can be delegated to an external 'helper' application (a Microsoft Word
document might be displayed by launching the Word application). All browsers can
be configured to do different things depending on the MIME-type of the information
received.
3.1.1. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
[HTTP] is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary
for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic,
stateless, object-oriented protocol which can be used for many tasks, such as
name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension
of its request methods (commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing of data
representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being
transferred. (HTTP 1.0 specification**)
HTTP was designed as a very simple request-response protocol. The commands
of HTTP are the 'request methods' used by browsers to ask for particular services
* In fact, it is hard to pin down exactly what the 'World Wide Web' encompasses; for example
modem Web browsers can access services using protocols other than HTTP(suchas FTPandgopher),
which has undoubtedly contributed to the success of these technologies (Dix, 1997). Here we focus
only on those components introduced by the Web which we consider to be the 'core' - HTTP, HTML
andCGI.
** http://ds.intemic.net/rfc/rfcI94S.txt
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