Version Management and Access Control Models for Co-operative Systems

1. To study, in detail, the problems of version management and access control in co-operative systems.
2. To propose mechanisms and models for versioning and access control and to derive a set of requirements for configuration management for CSCW.
3. To develop a sound theoretical framework for these models to allow reasoning about their properties.

Currently the display of web pages centres upon the presentation of a single instance of each page. As the web evolves to become a long-term information store (e.g. with the increasing use of Intranets), there will be a need to provide mechanisms to manage versions of web pages. Users must be able to access predictable information (e.g. the last version which they accessed) and be able to know what page versions are available and the attributes of these versions. We have devised a simple system which allows single web pages to be converted to a version set in a transparent way (i.e. all links continue to work). This system (V-Web) maintains and provides public and private access to a set of versions for web pages and includes facilities for both page readers and page authors. This page has been versioned.

• Ian Sommerville
• Tom Rodden
• Paul Rayson (from August 1996)
• Andy Kirby (from October 1996)

• Alan Dix (School of Computing, Staffordshire University.)

• Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)

• 35 months (to February 1997)

• R. Manderson, I. Sommerville, T. Rodden and A. Dix (1994)
  Version management for business oriented groupware systems.
  Ancillary Proceedings of HCI'94, Glasgow, Scotland. Ed. D. England.
• Andy Kirby, Paul Rayson, Tom Rodden, Ian Sommerville and Alan Dix (1997).
  Versioning the web. In Reidar Conradi (ed.) Software configuration management supplementary proceedings., 7th International Workshop, SCM7, Boston, USA, May 18-19, 1997. Dept. Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7034 Trondheim, Norway. pp 163-173. (abstract) [Also appears as Cooperative Systems Engineering Group (CSEG) Technical Report CSEG/21/1996 (postscript)]
• I. Sommerville, T. Rodden, P. Rayson, A. Kirby, and A. Dix (1998)
  Supporting information evolution on the WWW. World Wide Web Journal 1. Baltzer Science, Netherlands, pp. 45-54. [Note this journal is now published by Kluwer]

CSEG Projects | Cooperative Systems Engineering Group | Computing Department | Lancaster University