Evaluation of the flexible information sharing capabilities of VIEW media

Since it is necessary to realize virtual organizations in networks, to develop systems to be used for realizing various kinds of cooperation support among users is very important as a basis of virtual organizations. VIEW Media has been developed for such a purpose, utilizing CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) and database technologies. By introducing the concept of environment, VIEW Media supports flexible information sharing mechanisms. The major purpose of this paper is to show the advantages of the environment model for flexible sharing. Several well-known models are compared and then a representative model, the room model, is selected for comparison to develop the same application. Since the environment model is more general than the room model, we decided to develop "debate systems" which are rather complicated yet can be realized by both models. Debate systems can be regarded as generalization of conference systems and thus we believe the comparison is appropriate. By real usage of debate systems developed by VIEW Media (the environment model) and TeamWave (the room model), the environment model is shown to be suitable for such applications.