Coordination and artifact semantics in asynchronous distributed cooperation

The trend towards an information-based society calls for computers to assist people to collaborate across time and space. Such collaboration is now frequently needed to bring expertise together to develop artifacts such as documents, project plans, or other designs. Computer support for asynchronous distributed cooperation must allow individuals to work on related artifact components for short periods on their own and then bring their work together through transformations that are consistent across the related components and agreed to by the collaborators. This article defines a conceptual framework for asynchronous distributed cooperation on artifact production. The proposed semantic model is essentially an abstraction of an earlier implementation model, named RESPONSE, and it derives its expressiveness from object-oriented modeling. It is also an extension of our earlier work on artifact semantics. The article relates the semantic model to the RESPONSE implementation model and to the concepts drawn from activity theory. The semantic model describes an integrated conceptual framework for artifact and coordination semantics.