Design issues and model for a distributed multi-user editor

Computer Communications, 1996

A collaborative editing systems allows co-authors at different locations to edit a shared view of a single document simultaneously. A compound document binds various types of information to create a single seamless presentation. A collaborative compound document editing system is developed to combine both the systems described above. It supports distributed editing with replicated compound documents, and integrates notification mechanisms into concurrence control modules. The real-time conversational facilities and the mechanisms for tolerating the process faults are provided. The collaborative compound document editing system is endured with the coordinating and data exchanging capabilities. This paper also discusses design issues such as multiuser interfaces and the presentation of compound documents, and proposes our approaches.

2002

In the last years the Web became a great communication medium for publishing and delivering online multimedia documents. Therefore, the production (authoring, generation, transformation) of such documents became one of the most active research fields. This paper presents a web-based environment for cooperatively editing documents with workflow technology. The workflow technology provides a group of authors scattered across the network the means of guiding the authoring process by controlling the cooperative work. Second, this environment uses the most modern and promising Web technologies, such as XML, SVG, and SMIL to obtain a solution deployable world wide. Finally, we present another aspect concerning the content and user characteristics using CC/PP technology. Following such model offers not only a good description of the environment and its capabilities but defines also strategies about how some efficient interactions can be achieved.

Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion - CSCW '13, 2013

Collaborative editing (CE) has been an area of continuous research since early days of CSCW. Various CE systems have been studied in academia as research vehicles to investigate key technical issues in building advanced collaborative applications. In recent years, CE techniques have been increasingly adopted and further developed in industry for supporting real-world Internet or Cloud-based CE systems/services, such as Google Docs, Codoxware, IBM OpenCoWeb, Novell Vibe, and SubEthaEdit. This workshop aims to bring together CE academic researchers, industry developers, and endusers to discuss and exchange ideas on contemporary issues in researching, developing, and adopting CE systems. We have successfully organized this workshop annually at CSCW-related conferences. This year's workshop focuses on CE issues and techniques for supporting complex real-world documents (including but not limited to rich text, xml, spreadsheet, 2D/3D digital media, CAD, video, etc.), and evaluation of CE systems for such complex real-world documents.

2007

Résumé: In the last years network connectivity continuously expanded. However, existing collaborative environments were not designed to benefit from the fact that users are connected most of the time. For example, Wiki or version control systems allow users to work in isolation, but they tolerate blind modifications. For instance, users may concurrently perform the same task or they might work on obsolete versions of shared documents. We propose a novel writing mode for avoiding blind modifications by providing real-time ...

Efficient collaboration among remotely located colleagues is of key importance in the modern workplace. This paper describes the design and implementation of a distributed real-time col- laborative text editor. Unlike traditional editors that force users to edit separate copies of a file, this editor allows multiple networked users to modify the same document simultaneously. Our editor guarantees intention preservation, consistency and robustness. Intention preservation is achieved by representing a document as a linked list of uniquely named containers, such that edits are applied in the context in which they were performed, rather than at an exact index from the beginning of the document. Consistency of the document view at all collaborators’ computers is guaranteed by maintaining a total ordered undo/redo log. This novel combination of a log and uniquely named containers yields a much simpler scheme than ones used in similar editors. In addition, our editor is decentralized, so the system is not subject to a single point of failure. We believe that these features make our system more practical and robust than contemporary counterparts.

2002

This paper reports on considerations about the common basic functions and components for building a collaborative authoring environment. We aim to specify and systematize the technological issues towards the future standardization 16] of such environments, based on our previous research experiences. Standardization includes many difficult aspects, however it will extend and widen the field of applications possible within the collaborative and cooperative authoring paradigm, and will enable the usage of the fruits of years of research and individual implementations of the concept of collaborative, but mostly, cooperative authoring. In this paper, we try to set a systematic basis of a common platform for collaborative authoring.

1993

This article presents the Griffon groupware application which allows several users to cooperate for editing shared documents. Users access the application through a local area network of individual workstations and servers. The application provides such basic functionalities as management of document storage and access to distributed documents. It also offers high− level functionalities for managing user interaction and cooperation, for dynamically distributing roles to users, for editing documents in a structured way, for showing documents through multiple views, for controlling the consistency of modifications, for updating automatically all copies of shared documents, etc.

Information and Software Technology, 1993

Group collaborative editing is an activity by which people geographically dispersed can edit the same document simultaneously. It makes use of computers and network communication to provide an interactive and convenient environment, so people can save much of their time and cost. We have developed a group collaborative editing system which not only allows participants to jointly view and process multimedia documents but also provides real-time interactive conversation facilities to let users feel realistic and friendly. This paper describes the concepts of group collaboration and the mechanisms of our system, h also presents the interface design strategy and the synchronization control method.

Computers in Industry, 2006

The development of customisable working environments that not only manage information and communication, but also support the work processes of organisations is very important. In this paper we describe a collaborative approach that offers customisation in terms of the modes of collaboration that can be used alternatively in different stages of a project, i.e. synchronous and asynchronous, for two main classes of documents, textual and graphical. Moreover, by using a hierarchical structure for representing the documents, we offer a flexibility of working at different granularity levels. We highlight the fact that the real-time and asynchronous modes of communication use the same basic mechanisms for maintaining consistency in the collaborative environments.

Conference proceedings on Organizational computing systems - COCS '91, 1991

Group-writing, in which a document is jointly produced by a team of writers, occurs widely in science and in industry. There are now a number of products and research tools designed to support group-writing teams. Most, however, require use of non-mainstream word-processing systems, and assume that full information is available through a network to mediate conflicts. Tlds paper reports research on group-writing tools that deviate as little as possible from conventional word processors and assume only intermittent network connection for document exchange and conflict resolution. GroupWn.ter can be used by some people in a collaborative team as a conventional word processor, by others as a versioning and text/sound annotation system, and by others as a full hypertext system all while working with the same corpus of documents. It offers fill typographic and page layout facilities and imports typographic text from, andl exports to, the mainstream commercial word pmeessors.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2003

Scientific collaborations are established for a wide variety of tasks for which several communication modes are necessary, including messaging, file-sharing, and collaborative editing. In this position paper, we describe our work on the Pervasive Collaborative Computing Environment (PCCE) which aims to facilitate scientific collaboration within widely distributed environments. The PCCE provides a persistent space in which collaborators can locate each other, exchange messages synchronously and asynchronously and archive conversations. Our current interest is in exploring research and development of shared editing systems with the goal of integrating this technology into the PCCE. We hope to inspire discussion of technology solutions for an integrated approach to synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaborative editing.

2002

This paper analyses transformations in collaborative activities that a computersupported collaborative writing system introduces into co-authors' practices, and, discusses implications for the design of collaborative tools for writing. The analysis is grounded in user studies of four different groups of co-authors writing an academic report during two different collaborative situations. Two groups collaborate face-to-face using a word processor and the other two groups collaborate at a distance using a synchronous collaborative writing system. The study analyses differences between the activities of the groups and focuses on transformations that the CSCW system introduces into the organization of the co-authors' collaboration. The results show that the use of a CSCW system presents constraints in the collaborative activity; in particular we observed a cleavage that makes co-authors write different parts of a common document independently, i.e. without collaborating. This result opens up important issues related to the design of writing technologies for collaboration: how collaborative can collaborative writing be when it is supported by CSCW systems? How can the design of collaborative tools support organized and integrative collaborative activities such as writing? We discuss these issues and some of the alternatives that collaborative tools should offer for writing.

2017

Real-time collaborative editing allows multiple users to edit shared documents at the same time from different places. Existing real-time collaborative editors rely on a central authority that stores user data which is a perceived privacy threat. In this paper, we present MultiUser Text Editor (MUTE), a peer-to-peer web-based real-time collaborative editor without central authority disadvantages. Users share their data with the collaborators they trust without having to store their data on a central place. MUTE features high scalability and supports offline and ad-hoc collaboration.

Translating And The Computer, 1993

This paper identifies issues in computer-support for collaborative authoring of hyperdocuments and shows how SEPIA, a cooperative authoring environment, addresses these issues. First, hyperdocuments can be used to create and maintain technical documentation. Second, activity spaces support the cognitive and social processes involved in the creation of hyperdocuments. Third, a shared hyperdocument database, versioning, different modes of collaborative work, and awareness of the activities of other group members support asynchronous and synchronous distributed collaboration, as well as smooth transitions between them. Fourth, annotations can be used to communicate about drafts and plans. Although initial experience with SEPIA indicates that it provides strong dedicated support for collaborative writing of hyperdocuments, we identify annotations as one area where further improvement is possible and outline issues involved in providing better support for generating, receiving, and reacting to annotations.

Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work - CSCW '90, 1990

This paper reports on a project to develop a "work in preparation" editor, or PREP editor, to study co-authoring and commenting relationships. As part of the project, we have identified three issues in designing computer support for co-authoring and commenting: (1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of co-authoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction. For each of these issues, the paper describes the approach the PREP editor takes to address them. GOALS OF THE RESEARCH The goal of this project is to develop a "work in preparation" (PREP) editor, a multiuser environment to support a variety of collaborative and, in particular, co-authoring and commenting relationships for scholarly communication. In our research, we do not focus on collaborations in which co-authors or commenters interact at the same time, though systems that support research into the issues such collaborations raise are clearly valuable [StefS7]. Our focus is on enhancing the effectiveness of loosely-coupled collaboration. We focus on co-authoring because it represents an interesting challenge for collaborative work over networks: co-authors, after all, must share a planning environment that often relies on, but is nonetheless richer than a working draft. We focus on commenting because it poses a challenge for communication within authoring groups as well as between external readers and such groups. We focus on scholarly communication because scholarly communities as they exist today are already collaborative work groups. They are not explicitly organized around single, concrete goals, but members of groups share the common goal of advancing the state of knowledge. Such work groups are organized in local settings, but they also interact intensively at a distance, as members of a common "invisible college" [Cran72]. ISSUES IN SUPPORTlNG CO-AUTHORING AND COMMENTING The PREP editor we are developing addresses three issues: (1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of coauthoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction.