After one year, the major actors in the ?eld of cooperative design, visualization and engineering gathered together again by the side of the beautiful Medit- ranean Sea to exchange the research and development experience in the ?eld. CDVE2005servedasaforumtopromotetheresearchinthe?eldanditattracted greatattentionfromthe CDVE community.Thisyear,wereceivedcontributions from over 100 authors, 5 continents and more than 20 countries. As we can see, great progressin researchand development has been achieved since the last conference. We received papers on cooperative design, cooperative visualization, cooperative engineering and other cooperative applications. As an important trend, the researchers have started to attack the problems in CDVE from a more generic base. We are happy to see contributions such as constraint maintenance,decisionsupport,andsecurityenforcementforCDVE.Casestudies and application-speci?c developments are among the cooperative visualization papers. Along the line of cooperative engineering, knowledge management, - con?gurability, and concurrency control are major issues being addressed. Cooperativeworkingin design,visualization,engineering andother areashas di?erent degrees of cooperation.
I classify them as strong cooperation, inter- diate cooperation, and light cooperation. Strong cooperation involves real-time multiple-user multiple-location modi?cation to the same workspace.Light co- eration exists in the applications where the basic working relationship is only information or workspace sharing among the cooperative entities, no mod- cation to the workspace is involved. Therefore, any application that is shared by more than one single user can be considered as a light-degree cooperative application. Any application between these two extremes can be considered as intermediately cooperative. Our conference addressed the common and speci?c issues of all of them.