Domain Repositories as Coordination Support in Collaborative Engineering

Abstract

Collaborative engineering involves knowledge-intensive activities involving different specialists in collaboration processes tailored for the engineering domain under consideration. Focus of this paper is a specific aspect of coordination: how to support joint use of artefacts during collaborative engineering based on domain repositories. Starting from selected application examples, requirements towards domain repositories are identified. In this context, the domain repository ODIS offers basic functionality for coordination support by facilitating integrative, partitionable and user adaptable artefact management. Selected CSCW approaches, i.e. a groupware reference architecture and propositions for coordination mechanisms, are used to identify ODIS extensions.