One of the foundations of cooperative work is the exchange of data and especially data that is bound to a file. The usage
of tools like e-mail to exchange documents makes it difficult to keep the existing context and metadata linked to the document.
A general light-weighted approach and system-architecture will be presented that prevents the loss of document-meta-information
and organizes a distributed document-context as an abstract layer that summarizes and structures available metadata to a coherent
unit.
Keywords Metadata - Distributed Context - CSCW - System-Integration