Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. The very term {em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange between...

Conventional object-oriented data models are closed: although they allow users to define application-specific classes, they usually come with a fixed set of modelling primitives. This constitutes a major problem, as different application domains, e.g. database integration or multimedia, need special support.
Using an extended metaclass concept, this book provides for the solution of this problem a simple but extendible open object-oriented data model, a so-called RISC model. By introducing the basic concepts of the open object-oriented database management system VODAK, it demonstrates how...

In many of nowadays web-based environments for electronic marketing and commerce, that present large multimedia product and service catalogues, it becomes more and more difficult to provide naive end users, such as private consumers or commercial business partners, with intuitive user interfaces to access the large multimedia collections describing the presented products and services. The same holds for marketing managers and other employees responsible for managing and maintaining the large and constantly changing set of multimedia information chunks and fragments contained in these...

Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from 1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) technologies. The very term {em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange between...