Working Workspace
The working workspace contains the last available state of every document. Every operation (save, publish, delete, ...) modifies the document in the default workspace.
Live Workspace
Beside the working workspace, a second so called "live" workspace exists in the repository. In contrast to the working workspace the live workspace contains the last live state of every published document. Only documents which currently have a live version are included in the live workspace. Every time a document is published, a copy of the document is saved in the live workspace. Every time a document is set offline or deleted, the document is deleted from the live workspace. Thus, the live workspace represents a complete set of currently available live documents.
All API methods returning the document in its last published state are backed by the live workspace. It is also used internally to query all documents in their last live version.