Sunday 9 March 2008

Zipping, Collaboration vs Cooperation

Reading further the diploma work "Towards an Integrated Approach to Collaborative Web Usage" I have found two more items that are worth to know.

Zipping
A feature that may be particularly interesting for determining which sections of a larger document a user is interested in is also explained: zipping. This is done by determining the sections and subsections via their tags (H1, H2, etc.) and then allowing the user to collapse or expand those sections.

Collaboration vs Cooperation
Collaboration is the process of multiple people or groups working together with a common goal. For example, a group of scientists working in the same field and sharing the results of their individual research do collaborate. While this could also be called cooperation, the relationship between people involved in collaboration is considered much closer. In particular, while cooperation may take place between competing parties, there's an atmosphere of trust and sharing information in a collaborative environment, and there is much more of a team spirit ([Maxwell, Beyond Cooperation]). Therefore, two competing companies may cooperate in the specification of a new standard that both are in need of - but this would not be called collaboration.
This implies an important relationship between the terms that shall be made explicit: collaboration can be seen as a more specific description of working together than cooperation. Instances of collaboration are usually instances of cooperation, but instances of cooperation are usually not instances of collaboration. Therefore, providing a means for collaboration includes support for cooperation as well.

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