This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2007, held in Melbourne, Australia, in April 2007. This book, as the fourth volume of its series on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Design, includes 60 articles that are the expanded versions of the papers presented at CSCWD 2007. The book is organized in topical sections on CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, agents and multi-agent systems, Web services, Semantic Web, and Grid computing, knowledge management, security, privacy, and trust in CSCW systems, workflow management, e-learning, and other applications.

Design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple sophisticated commercial and non-commercial engine- ing tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, en- neering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and independently with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long period of time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of details. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have efficient comput- supported collaborative design systems. These systems should not only automate in- vidual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate, and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. Based on close international collaboration between the University of Technology of Compiègne in France and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Ac- emy of Sciences in the early 1990s, a series of international workshops on CSCW in Design started in 1996. In order to facilitate the organization of these workshops, an International Working Group on CSCW in Design (CSCWD) was established and an International Steering Committee was formed in 1998. The series was converted to int- national conferences in 2000 building on the success of the four previous workshops.

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple commercial and non-commercial engineering tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have effective and efficient collaborative design environments. These environments should not only automate individual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2006, held in Nanjing, China in May 2006. Among topics covered are CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, Web services, knowledge management, security and privacy in CSCW systems, workflow management, and e-learning.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005. The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement.

Information technology has been used in organisational settings and for organisational purposes such as accounting, for a half century, but IT is now increasingly being used for the purposes of mediating and regulating complex activities in which multiple professional users are involved, such as in factories, hospitals, architectural offices, and so on. The economic importance of such coordination systems is enormous but their design often inadequate. The problem is that our understanding of the coordinative practices for which these systems are developed is deficient, leaving systems developers and software engineers to base their designs on commonsensical requirements analyses. The research reflected in this book addresses these very problems. It is a collection of articles which establish a conceptual foundation for the research area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.