Data Model

  Project   The information space is organized into projects. Each project specifies an administrator, its organization, the project partners involved and the access rights for these partners. The project-specific information may also contain a set of phases with start and end dates for this project. Projects are linked into a hierarchy; the root project specifies the entry point into the information space. Partners in a subproject must also be a partner in the root project.   Partner   For each project partner, a user profile is established that contains all contact information for this partner. This information can be maintained by the partner self. Partners must authenticate to the system in order to be recognized as oneself. This recognition serves to author documents and actions, such that both credit and responsibility are assigned to the right person. Partners are grouped into teams. Teams can only be defined for the root project, but this organization into teams is also visible in subprojects.   Document   Documents constitute the entities in the information space. The types of documents are defined by the partners and the applications and tools they adopt. Documents are referenced in the database by URL. Other document information includes categories, attributes, authoring and timing information and links to other documents. Document links allow the user to specify relationships between different documents, e.g., to group entities, specify threads of messages or attach messages to other information entities, or specify versioning sequences in collaborative work. Other user-defined links can also be specified. Link information includes authoring and timing information and an optional qualifier.   Cube   The documents in a project are organized according to three dimensions, named area, time and type. Each combination of project, area, time and type specifies a cube in the information space. The exact specification of these dimensions, i.e., their units, are left to the project team, in person of the project administrator. Documents may be searched and retrieved by cube. Search criteria include authoring and timing information, categories and attribute information.   Authoring   Authoring information is automatically recorded by the system as a result of user actions on documents or links. Additional authoring information can be specified to collaborative documents: partners can be specified as readers or writers for a specific document. Only readers and writers have corresponding access rights to collaborative documents.   Access rights   User access rights are specified by cube. A user may have delete, write, read or no permission to all the documents in a cube. Collaborative documents, with specification of readers and writers, overwrite these permissions by individual document.