Database support for cooperative work documentation

Technological changes impose a constant evolution on all kinds of artifacts, and require new solutions for their efficient maintenance. Appropriate documentation is considered fundamental for maintenance and evolution. This situation is even more crucial when one considers today's cooperative environments for designing and developing artifacts. Most of the time, documentation is static and describes WHAT an artifact is, and sometimes HOW it was designed and constructed. Moreover, in collaborative work, documentation serves as one of the communication means among all involved in creating an artifact. However, several other types of documentation needs have been identified in many domains - e.g., medicine, engineering, biology or astronomy - such as flexible versioning for keeping track of an artifact's entire evolution, as well as documentation for the reasoning (the WHY) behind its construction. Unfortunately: no comprehensive system exists to handle all these documentation requirements: each kind of document is managed by a separate system, and furthermore studied in a different Computer Science held. WHAT documentation may fall within database or software engineering research, whereas How is often restricted to hypermedia systems and CSCW, and WHY is handled in the context of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science. This paper presents a unified framework to manage all these kinds of documents within a single database, for engineering artifacts. This allows integrating and coordinating the (cooperative) work of different types of users of these artifacts: designers, customers, salespeople, constructors. This eliminates the break in continuity found in normal environments, where each kind of documentation is handled separately and uses distinct implementation paradigms. Our framework is exemplified in the context of software module configuration.