Special section: Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design

摘要

This special section contains extended selected papers of the 2009 International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design which was held in Santiago, Chile in April 2009. Advances in networking technology have led to a much greater availability of resources and improved communication methods and thus have facilitated the possibility of higher levels of cooperative working in many domains. To maximize the potential of shared computing systems, the underlying technology must be robust and reliable. Grid computing technology is a very good example of how the linking and sharing of resources can benefit both scientific and business computational processing activities. A grid can provide an excellent underlying infrastructure to support cooperative working in design where often both computational and data processing needs are high. The systems built on top of such technology must not only take advantage of distribution and parallelism but should also respond to the specific needs of the user. The International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design addresses many aspects of collaborative work from the underlying facilitating and supporting technologies through to application development and the associated complex matter of human group behavior which is an essential factor in systems acceptance. The selection of papers for this special section focuses on applications that offer possibilities of enhancing the services provided by a grid system. Some papers describe applications which are specific to particular domains. Others present generic applications. All have relevance to grid or distributed computing.