A customizable shared information space to support concurrent design

Sharing data is an important aspect in distributed design environments and should be supported by an underlying system. Any synchronous access to data is conflict prone. Applying concurrency control and two phase commit are one option to be considered. But design processes also demand for cooperation between the designers. Negotiation about actions on the product under design and the early exchange of preliminary results are crucial issues. Controlled data access by itself does not fulfil all the needs for cooperation. We will present a new approach that relies on a concept and system model which integrates concurrent activities by a joint information space offering flexible protocols for cooperation on the shared objects. We will describe the customizability of the protocols to effectively support different cooperative scenarios.