Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/J08560/01
Title:	VERSION MANAGEMENT AND ACCESS CONTROL MODELS FOR CO-OPERATIVE SYSTEMS
Principal Investigator:	Sommerville, Professor I
Other Investigators:	Dix, Professor AJ Rodden, Professor T
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing & Communications
Organisation:	Lancaster University
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 September 1993	Ends:	28 February 1997	Value (£):	137,069
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Human-Computer Interactions
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
1. To study, in detail, the problems of version management and access control in cooperative systems. 2. To propose mechanisms and models for versioning and access control and to derive a set of requirements for configuration management software for CSCW. 3. To develop a sound theoretical framework for these models to allow reasoning about their properties. Progress:The work has now been underway for approximately 18 months. We have made an extensive study of version management problems for cooperative systems by defining a number critical issues for version management such as change integration, awareness, version publication, and history management. Using these issues as a basis for comparison, we have considered all existing systems with some version support and discovered areas where these systems are lacking. We have also decided to use a collaborative spreadsheet as a vehicle for investigating our ideas on version management and have developed a prototype spreadsheet system. We have chosen this system because the shared elements are fine-grain (the spreadsheet cell) and it is possible to design collaboration experiments without undue difficulty. This system has been implemented on a Sun workstation. We are currently working towards achieving our second objective, namely the development of a model for collaborative version and access control. We envisage that this will be completed within the next few months. We are investigating the complex relationships between access rights and ownership in shared systems and will propose a model which significantly extends the normal relationships between these. We also propose that ownership and access rights should be fine-grain rather than applied to documents or files as a whole and that multiple users should be aware of the presence of other users. We have carried out some initial studies on formalising such a model but the main thrust of this work will not begin until Autumn 1995.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.lancs.ac.uk