Driving Problems

So what specifically are the problems solved by this research? Let us look at some of the problems have driven the research in collaborative systems. We will first look at some specific areas and them some general tasks that could benefit from collaborative systems.

Areas

• Writing: Documents of all kinds - papers, proposals, brochures, etc - are often coauthored, and manually managing a coauthoring process, specially when the coauthors are distributed, is generally difficult.

  Collaborative applications can allow distributed co-authors to easily observe and comment on each others' activities and help ensure the consistency of the document.

• Business Management: As mentioned before, businesses require teamwork to be successful and are often distributed. Collaborative applications can enable managers in distributed businesses to make better group decisions [], follow business processes [], and monitor the status of ongoing projects.

• Software Engineering: Every phase of software engineering - requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and maintenance, requires collaboration, and software development is rapidly getting distributed. Collaborative applications can help distributed software engineers share the results of software development tools such as debugging and testing tools [] and to follow software processes [].

• Engineering/Design: The benefits of collaborative software engineering extend to the general area of computer-aided engineering design/manufacturing, thereby allowing what is known as ''just-in-time'' manufacturing.

  Of particular interest here are distributed collaborative VR interfaces for simulating real-world objects being engineered such as ships/automobiles [].

• Collaboratories: The National Science Foundation has developed the vision of distributed collaboratories, allowing geographically-dispersed scientists working together on national/international projects to exchange results in a timely fashion and monitor and discuss data gathered from remote instruments [,,].

• Education: There is increasing interest in distance education, especially in sparsely populated areas. Collaborative applications can enable distance education by allowing teachers to lecture to students in remote sites, lab assistants to consult with remote students. and distributed students to collaborate with each others.

• Medicine: Collaborative applications can enable telemedicine, and possibly even telesurgery [], improve the communication among medical personnel and ensure that proper medical processes are followed.

• Air Traffic Control: One of the trickiest coordination problems is air-traffic control. Collaborative applications can allow air-traffic controllers and pilots to view upto date status information regarding the positions of aircrafts.

• Command and Control: Similar problems arise in military command and control operations, and collaborative applications can support planning and monitoring of these operations.

• Games/Social Interaction: As mentioned earlier, CSCW is not only about supporting work - it includes other forms of interaction such as playing games and, perhaps more importantly, interacting in informal meeting places [,,].

Tasks

As we shall see later, the nature of a collaborative application often depends on the task it is supporting. Therefore, it is important to identify some of the important collaborative tasks that could benefit from computer support.

• Design: One of the most collaboration-intensive phases in the building of a product is its design, be it the design of an assignment, a software module, or an aircraft. Collaborative applications can help in this task by allowing users to brainstorm, make decisions, and create outlines of final products.

• Implementation: In comparison to design, the implementation of a product, in general, requires less communication among the developers of the product, as each developer, typically, works individually on a piece of the product. However, in this phase, it becomes more important to provide computer support to prevent/cure inconsistent concurrent interaction.

• Inspection/Review: Research in software engineering has shown that collaborative inspections of design, code, and other software documents is an effective mechanism for finding faults. Collaborative applications can, therefore, help distributed users browse and annotate documents, categorize faults, and follow appropriate inspection processes. They can be used not only for inspecting software documents but other kinds of important documents such as legal documents.

• Consulting: In the course of solving a problem, the problem solver often requires the help of a remote expert. For instance, a medical examiner trying to identify the cause of an injury might need the help of a remote pathologist who is the word expert on that particular kind of injury []. Similarly, a student might need the help of a remote lab assistant, a general practitioner might need the help of a remote specialist, and a person debugging a software module might need the help of a remote author of the module. Collaborative applications can help facilitate such remote consultation, allowing the problem solver to demonstrate the problem to the expert and receive advice.

This is a brief and superficial discussion of the CSCW problem space, which is still a matter of research. Later, we will discuss in more detail parts of this space when we look at various collaboration taxonomies, applications, and experience. At this point, what is important to observe is that there are a large variety of areas/tasks can benefit from the ability of collaborative applications to both allow distributed collaborators to feel they are colocated and to automatically provide facilities such as consistency control, categorization of faults, and decision making.