Ana María Martínez Enríquez

AllianceWeb: cooperative authoring on the WWW

Currently, few applications provide support for collaborative work on the Web. This paper presents the way by which cooperative authoring can be easily and efficiently performed between authors distributed on the Web. The main goal is to provide support for allowing them to create common Web documents in a secure and consistent way. We present the AllianceWeb project whose goal is to extend the Web environment to support cooperative authoring of documents. It provides several features such as user identification, document and resource naming, document sharing and management, document replication and consistency, storage management. Our approach unifies both the hybrid and the fully distributed architectures for document storage and access. Although the architectures seem antagonistic, they are integrated within our system to allow distributed and temporarily disconnected cooperative authoring of Web documents. Our project builds on our previous experience on the design and implementation of Alliance, a cooperative editor of structured documents on the Internet.

Before Getting There: Potential and Actual Collaboration

In this paper we introduce the concepts of Actual and Potential Collaboration Spaces. The former applies to the space where collaborative activities are performed, while the second relates to the initial space where opportunities for collaboration are identified and an initial interaction is established. We present a characterization for Potential Collaboration Spaces featuring awareness elements for the potential of collaboration and mechanisms to gather and present them, as well as mechanisms to establish an initial interaction and associated GUI elements. We argue that by making this distinction explicit, and characterizing Potential Collaboration Spaces, designers of groupware can better identify the technical requirements of their systems and thus provide solutions that more appropriately address their users concerns. We illustrate this concept with the design of an application that supports Potential Collaboration Spaces for the PINAS web-based coauthoring middleware.

A Cooperative, Deductive and Self-Adaptive Web Authoring Environment

Related to the cooperative editing research domain and to the works currently developed on the World Wide Web, we present AllianceWeb, an editing and cooperative authoring system on the Web. Using this system, authors distributed among the world can cooperate producing large documentations in a consistent and concerted way. Taking benefits of the design and experiment of the Alliance cooperative editor on Internet, the AllianceWeb approach proposes a mixed architecture (hybrid and/or fully distributed) for the document storage and access. These two architectures are integrated to provide a concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support.

A Distributed Event Service for Adaptive Group Awareness

This paper is directly focused on the design of middleware functions to support a distributed cooperative authoring environment on the World Wide Web. Using the advanced storage and access functions of the PInAS middleware, co-authors can produce fragmented and replicated documents in a structured, consistent and efficient way. However, despite it provides elaborated, concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support and mechanisms, this kind of applications requires a suited and efficient inter-application communication service to design and implement flexible, efficient, and adapted group awareness functionalities.Thus, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation of a centralized version of a Distributed Event Management Service that allows to establish communication between cooperative applications, either in distributed or centralized mode. As an essential component for the development of cooperative environments, this Distributed Event Management Service allowed us to design an Adaptive Group Awareness Engine whose aim is to automatically deduce and adapt co-authors cooperative environments to allow them collaborate closer. Thus, this user associated inference engine captures the application events corresponding to authors actions, and uses its knowledge and rule bases, to detect co-authors complementary or related work, specialists, or beginners, etc. Its final goal is to propose modifications to the author working environments, application interfaces, communication or interaction ways, etc.

PIÑAS: Supporting a Community of Co-authors on the Web

To provide efficient support for collaborative writing to a community of authors is a complex and demanding task, members need to communicate, coordinate, and produce in a concerted fashion in order to obtain a final version of the documents that meets overall expectations. In this paper, we present the PINAS middleware, a platform that provides potential and actual collaboration spaces, as well as specific services customized to support collaborative writing on the Web. We start by introducing PINAS Collaborative Spaces and an extended version of Doc2U, the current tool that implements them, that integrate and structure a suite of specialized project and session services. Later, a set of services for the naming, identification, and shared management of authors, documents and resources in a replicated Web architecture is presented. Finally, a three-tier distributed architecture that organizes these services and a final discussion on how they support a community of authors on the Web is presented.

Awareness and coordination for web cooperative authoring

This paper presents our approach to design and provide elaborated awareness coordination functions for cooperative production of complex Web shared documents. We designed a Group Awareness Inference Engine (GAIE) that catches working focus of collaborators and then deduces some of their potential interests for communication to enhance coordination and cooperative production.

An Inference Engine for Web Adaptive Cooperative Work

This paper describes the principle of an inference engine that analyzes useful information of actions, performed by cooperating users, to propose modifications of the states and/or the presentation of the shared objects. Using cooperative groupware applications, a group of people may work on the same task while other users may pursue their individual goals using various other applications (cooperative or non-cooperative) with different roles. In such environment, consistency, group awareness and security have essential significance. The work of each user can be observed by capturing their actions and then analyzing them in relation to the history of previous actions. The proposed Adaptive Inference Engine (AIE) behaves as a consumer of application events which analyzes this information on the basis of some predefined rules and then proposes some actions that may be applied within the cooperative environment. In all cases, the user controls the execution of the proposed group awareness actions in his working environment. A prototype of the AIE is developed using the Amaya Web Authoring Toolkit and the PInAS collaborative authoring middleware.

A flexible distribution service for a co-authoring environment on the Web

The PINAS platform provides support to collaboratively and consistently produce shared documents in the Web environment. Such documents may include possible costly multimedia resources, whose management raises important issues due to the constraints imposed by Web technology. In this paper, we present a flexible service for distributing shared Web documents across authoring group sites. To carry out distribution, our approach takes into account the current organization of the involved sites, the access rights granted to the co-authors and the site storage capabilities. Scenarios are used to motivate the need for robust mechanisms for the management of shared Web documents and their resources, and to illustrate how our approach addresses these issues.

Adaptive Resource Management in the PIÑAS Web Cooperative Environment

The PINAS Web cooperative environment allows distributed authors working together to produce shared documents in a consistent way. The management of shared resources in such an environment raises important technical issues due to the constraints imposed by Web technology. An elaborated group awareness function is provided that allows each author notifying his contributions to other authors, and controlling the way by which other contributions are integrated into his/her environment. In order to support this function, essential to every groupware application, we designed a self-adaptive cooperative environment. We propose a new way of structuring Web documents to be considered as independent resource containers with their corresponding management context. This representation of information simplifies the design of mechanisms to share, modify and update documents and their resources in a consistent and controlled way. Scenarios are used to motivate the need for robust mechanisms for the management of shared Web documents and to illustrate how the extensions presented address these issues.

An Adaptive Cooperative Web Authoring Environment

Using AllianceWeb, authors distributed around the world can cooperate producing large documents in a consistent and concerted way. In this paper, we highlight the main aspects of the group awareness function that allows each author to diffuse his contribution to other co-authors, and to control the way by which other contributions are integrated into his environment. In order to support this function, essential to every groupware application, we have designed a self-adaptive cooperative interaction environment, parametrized by user preferences. Thus, the characteristics of an adaptive group awareness agent are defined.