Cooperative database system: A constructive review of cooperative transaction models

The use of transactions to provide reliable and secure information processing and data management has increasingly gained the attention of the CSCW community. Traditional transaction models have, however, been claimed to be too restrictive in the context of cooperation. Research on transaction support for cooperative work has therefore particularly aimed at finding mechanisms and frameworks to overcome this limitation. In this paper we survey the work done in the development of flexible and cooperative transaction models. This survey has been divided into two categories. The first consists of approaches mainly based on the CSCW perspective, while the second category consists of database methods extended to support cooperation. The paper also provides an evaluation of the models with respect to relevant criteria and requirements for cooperative work settings.