Managing and sharing collaborative files through WWW

The increasing complexity and geographical separation of design data, tools and teams have demanded for a collaborative and distributed management env ironment. In this paper, we present a practical system, the CFMS, which is designed to manage collaborative files on WWW. Wherever remote developers a re, they can navigate the evolutions and relationships between target files , check in and check out them conveniently on web browsers using CFMS. The capabilities of CFMS include the two-level navigation mechanism for version selection, the relationship model that conceptually manages the relationsh ips between physical files as well as the prefix-based naming scheme that c an uniquely identify requested objects. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.