Conceptual and concrete architectures in the design of CSCW applications

CSCW applications support the development of various types of cooperative applications and their integration. However, little attention has been paid to the gap between the semantic level of articulation work and the semantic level of the implementation platform. This semantic level gap is widely recognized in CSCW as a big source of problems from the application usability point of view. The paper presents a framework for the construction of supports to articulation work which tries to overcome the semantic gap by starting from the requirements of articulation work and by identifying its conceptual model (components, their aggregations and communication language). This leads to a component based view of the resulting system, where components play active and specialized roles and interact via well identified communication patterns. In this view, it was natural to think of a conceptual architecture based on a multi-agent approach, where agents are heterogeneous. Finally, the paper shows how the conceptual architecture can be mapped onto a concrete architecture, whose characteristics are generality, efficiency, robustness and so on.