Griffon: A cooperative, structured, distributed document editor

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.

1994

The collaborative editing of documents is a very common task nowadays. Writing groups are often distributed over many locations because of the globalization of organizations and the increasing interdisciplinarity of tasks. Since many writers already use computers for their jobs, providing computer support for the collaborative writing process has been identified as an important goal. Numerous tools for computer supported collaborative writing have already emerged but in most cases have not come into widespread usage.

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.

36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the, 2003

A number of real-time group editors have been developed as vehicles for investigating various technical issues in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Excellent as they are in serving academic purposes, those research prototypes are not (and will probably not be) widely used by ordinary users for "serious" group editing activities. The reason is primarily that they are generally not as powerful or usable as single-user editors that people are already familiar with. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which converts existing singleuser editors to group editors without modifying their source code. As a result, different editors such as Word and GVim can be shared by a group of distributed users to edit the same document simultaneously. Users can use familiar single-user editors for collaborative editing which are allowed to be heterogeneous. Towards this end we have been working on a research project called intelligent collaboration transparency or ICT to address related technical issues. Our work is novel compared to existing application-sharing systems especially in that it is able to interoperate heterogeneous single-user applications. We report our latest progress on this project.

Advances in Human Factors/Ergonomics, 1995

Cooperative editing is an important field in CSCW. Many editors have been developed or extended to allow several users to work simultaneously on shared documents. At the same time, an important research activity is carried out in the field of structured documents. Cooperative editing and structured documents share many common issues and it seems natural to take advantage of the advances in these two fields for constructing new tools that allow users to cooperate in producing complex structured documents.

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.

We present a distributed Java application that allows several people, possibly at different locations, to edit the same file at the same time while exchanging comments on the changes they are making to the file. While still being a prototype, our application provides a vivid demonstration of the benefits of collaborative editing.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Collaborative software tools allow people to share documents and knowledge via Internet, in a simple, economic and efficient way. Unfortunately collaborative software often relies heavily on visual features and dynamic technologies with user interfaces that are difficult to use via screen reader, or are sometimes even inaccessible for the blind. In this paper we illustrate and discuss results of an accessibility inspection of the main collaborative functions of Google Docs using the JAWS screen reader. Results highlight several difficulties encountered when interacting with elements of the Google Docs interfaces. Content perception is often incomplete, since many elements or changes occurring in the collaborative environment are not intercepted by the screen reader and announced to the user. In addition, the behavior of the collaborative functions analyzed (as well as the rendering) changes from one web browser to another. Some general guidelines are discussed, for designing user interfaces of collaborative editors that are more usable when interacting via screen reader.

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.

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.