An architecture for adaptively replicating cooperative shared objects

The static data-sharing model employed by most groupware systems is not fit for the dynamic nature of today's cooperative environments. We present a dynamic replica distribution model, which replicates shared object replicas adaptively according to user requirement as well as dynamic cooperation context. A replicating structure between fully-replicated and fully-centralized ones is achieved through the process of structural adaptation; concurrency adaptation is also used to achieve a multi-replica consistency policy between traditional optimistic and pessimistic paradigms. XML is used as the underlying support layer for representing the structures and contents of shared cooperative objects.