The Virtual Workspace System (VWS): an enabling technology for collaborating engineering applications

Describes the Virtual Workspace System (VWS), which provides a service for sharing states (both data and meta-data or schemata) for asynchronous collaborating engineering applications. Its key features are: (1) a reliable and platform-independent message transport mechanism between client workspaces; (2) an ontological formalism for describing the content of the collaborating workspaces, based on the object-oriented model and extending it with the notion of constraints; (3) selective sharing based on interest; (4) the ability to group events together into transactions; (5) support for conflict detection/resolution support; and (6) collaboration policies that can be set at the object level (e.g. a user can be notified of changes to an object of class C1 immediately, but not so for objects of class C2). VWS is being used to develop a collaborative application to support both facilities design and maintenance management at the US Army's Fort Gordon.