The CASCADE research effort is eclectic in that the people working on it each choose some aspect of the problem to focus on. Computer Augmented Support of Collaborative Authoring is kind of like an elephant. The various researchers are like the proverbial blind men examining the elephant, trunk, leg, and ears. As stated on the research themes page, the effort involves SGML, hypertext, multimedia, DBMSs,network protocols, system design, visualization, data mining, social computing, and intelligent agents to name a view. Perhaps the best single overview of the effort is provided by the paper The CASCADE System: A Design Overview. This paper provides a sense of the research questions that CASCADE is intended to address and talks about the original goals for the development of the system -- as we saw them in 1996. It is sometimes difficult to give people a sense of all the things that we know CASCADE can do. Because the current version is still being refined, many of the features that we have prototyped are not yet in place. In 1997, Users' Guide: Introduction to CASCADE, provided a snapshot of CASCADE with many of the features in place -- it provides the best comprehensive overview of the capability of the original X windows version.

Several papers have addressed one or another aspects of the project. A few of these are pointed to below:

• Embodying Social Capital Facilitators in a Collaborative Authoring System was presented at AIS97 in Indianapolis Indiana and describes some of our more recent thinking about the use of agents to support collaboration
• Multi-level Navigation in Large Document Spaces was presented at the first annual conference on Leveraging Cyberspace held at XEROX PARC in 1996 and is the simplest and most direct discussion of some of our efforts at multi-level navigation.
• The Use of CASCADE in Standards Development was presented at the IEEE International Engineering Management Conference '96, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 18-20, 1996 describes a very early effort to understand some of the problems and issues related to collaborative authoring. This study drove the original X Windows version of CASCADE to its highest level of functionality.
• Software to Aid Collaboration: Focus on Collaborative Authoring was prepared a a technical report, presented at a couple conferences in different forms and submitted to NIST as part of our 1996 work effort.
• Patterns for Human Computer Interaction is a version of a paper originally entitled "Use of Patterns to Increase Communication and Stability in Design of Human-Computer Interaction" which was presented at the Seminar on Integrating Human Factors with Software Engineering, 1994 Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Nashville, TN, October 25, 1994, pp 101-106.