A shared workspace is associated with a group of users who share the workspace, which isolates a set of shared resources from other resources stored in a repository that supports versioning of resources. The content of a shared workspace is maintained using a set of shared references, to the set of resources associated with the shared workspace. A virtual workspace is created for a user by generating a personal mapping for the user, where the personal mapping indicates which resources from the set of shared resources the user has made personal, e.g., by checking out such resources from the repository. If the user submits a query on the repository, the particular version of each resource involved in the query is readily determinable from the shared workspace and the user's virtual workspace.