Thomas Bopp and Jonas Schulte
Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn, F¨urstenallee 11, 31102 Paderborn, Germany
{astra, schulte}@uni-paderborn.de

The usage of CSCWsystems for teaching, training, and research collaboration increases constantly, as it offers a time- and place-independent, as well as a cost-effective platform. The user’s search should not be restricted to local material; in fact, users benefit from different search environments, as, for example digital libraries to find appropriate working material. Searching and further processing of documents imply a media breach since the search cannot be invoked in current CSCW systems directly. This paper presents the first prototype of a CSCW system which enables users to search in external sources without media breach. To provide arbitrary search environments no restrictions to data formats or search functionalities are allowed. Hence we have enhanced search environments with self description capabilities in order to realize an automatic binding of search environments in CSCW systems. By search environments we address any system offering searchable knowledge bases, such as digital libraries or the CSCWsystem itself. Furthermore our concept supports local search and searching in different external sources at the same time.

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