This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2004, held in Xiamen, China, in September 2004. The 45 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They contain expanded versions of the papers presented at the conference and are organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, agents and multi-agent systems, ontology and knowledge management, collaborative design and...

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidiscip- nary design teams using multiple commercial and proprietary engineering software tools (e.g., CAD, modeling, simulation, visualization, and optimization), engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of mult- isciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various en- neering software tools which are located at different sites. In addition, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from different...