'Computer-Supported Cooperative Work' is a young research area considering applications with strong demands on database technology. Design applications need support for cooperation and some means for controlling their inherent dynamics. However, today's CAD systems consisting of a collection of diverse design tools typically do not support these requirements. Therefore, an encompassing processing model is needed that covers the overall design process in general as well as CAD-tool application in particular. The CONCORD model described in the paper, reflects the distinct properties of design process dynamics by distinguishing three levels of abstraction. The highest level supports application-specific cooperation control and design process administration, the second considers goal-oriented tool invocation and work-flow management while the third level provides tool processing of design data. To achieve level-spanning control, the authors rely on transactional facilities provided at the various system layers.>

PRIMA is a non-standard database system developed at the University Kaiserslautern. Its major purpose is the support of engineering design applications, such as VLSI design and software engineering. The applications require tailored application-dependent interfaces which, however, all share basic notions like that of a composite object. Hence, the approach of PRIMA is to offer an application-independent complex-object interface (the moleculeatom data model, shortly called MAD model) and to provide means to easily augment this interface by application-dependent functionality. In the following, we will concentrate on the MAD model and its implementation.