A Kernel-Based CSCW Platform-KBCSCW

Nowadays, more and more CSCW systems come into our life, helping people to well cooperate with each other. Examples of such kinds of applications are cooperative edition system, cooperative design system, cooperative diagnosis system, etc. By studying all of these cooperative systems, people are surprised to find that there are a lot of common functionalities shared by them, although they are designed to help people do different cooperative work. This leads us to the truth that cooperative application designers are spending a lot of effort on repeated work, thus bringing down efficiency.This reality brings us the need of a cooperative platform, which can provide a variety of necessary and common cooperative services to all the cooperative application running on it. Kernel based software structure will, without doubt, provide software with great flexibility of customizing outer-kernel modules and high maintainability, so if we could combine the flexibility of kernel structure, component development technique with development of CSCW platform, then we would probably obtain a highly flexible and extendable CSCW platform, which will easily satisfy requirements of a collection of cooperative systems.In this paper, we make deep exploration into characteristics of CSCW, and study a lot of related research fruits of CSCW, based on which we come to the success of presenting a kernel based CSCW platform, which could provide a high degree of flexibility. This platform design make innovative and plenty use of kernel software philosophy, and we implement the functional parts of every level to be components or plug-ins; simultaneously, we divide KBCSCW architecture to several layers based on functional generality: common service layer, domain service layer and cooperative application layer, this architecture design help KBCSCW better organize and manage its functional parts, and also enhance the platform modules' reusability. Of course, kernel of KBCSCW is not mature now, because it has a lack of CSCW related elements, and in the future, we will focus on applying module technique to CSCW and enriching common service layer and kernel layer of KBCSCW.