Flexible computer support for collaboration in civil infrastructure management

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has come to encompass a broad field of research that looks at how groups perform work and seeks to discover how technology (especially computers) can help people work. Consequently, CSCW has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, which attempts to combine the hardware and software technologies of computer science and engineering with the theories and studies of the social sciences. CSCW has become an extremely active area of research. Despite the field's rapid advancement over the past decade, researchers in the area of CSCW are still grappling with a number of fundamental issues. Two of these issues are (1) the seamless integration of support for asynchronous and synchronous cooperative work and (2) the ability for individual users to flexibly change or tailor their mode of collaboration while engaged in real time interaction. This thesis describes a new approach to handling both these issues. The approach is called the Flexible Collaborative Support (FLECS) framework. This approach relies on the use of active database technology, an explicit organizational model, and flexible/tailorable transaction management. This thesis bridges the gap between CSCW and multi-user database systems. It does so by supporting awareness of other users' presence in the information space as well as providing visualization of other users' actions, thus fulfilling the most fundamental requirement of CSCW systems. At the same time, the work in this thesis proposes capitalizing on the data security and consistency management methods, which have formed the foundation of multi-user database systems. This thesis also presents CityCollab and its evaluation by a community of users. CityCollab is a collaborative system, which supports the processing of Requests for Work in the context of civil infrastructure management. CityCollab represents an instantiation of the more general FLECS architecture/framework.