An approach for supporting inter-application consistency

In a cooperative design environment many users need to be aware of modifications made to shared data. Traditional concurrency control mechanisms may cause data to be locked for long periods of time. A mechanism, which helps client programs to keep shared data up-to-date is presented. The mechanism is based on asynchronous notifications. In addition to ensuring consistency between different clients, the same model can be used to retain many consistent views (windows) to data cached on the client. The mechanism can be extended to support more complicated groupwork protocols