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Awareness and Coordination for Web Cooperative Authoring
Abstract
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.
... The 3C collaboration model has often been used in the literature to classify collaborative tools or to support CSCW analysis (Muhammad et al. 2005; Neale et al. 2004; Kaariainen and Valimaki 2011; Wirth and Albayrak 2011; Fuks et al. 2008). Organizing collaborative tools according to this model facilitates the analysis of issues related to each dimension separately while composing a complete solution (Fuks et al. 2007). ...
The developers’ physical dispersion in Distributed Software Development (DSD) imposes challenges related to awareness support during collaboration in such scenario. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review and mapping that gathered, analyzed, and classified studies that improve awareness support in DSD, providing an overview of the area. Our initial search returned 1967 papers, of which 91 were identified as reporting some awareness support to DSD. These papers were then analyzed, and classified according to the 3 C collaboration model and to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework. Our findings suggest that awareness in DSD is gaining increasingly attention, 71 out of 91 papers were published from 2006 to 2010. Most part of the papers presented tools with some awareness support. The classification showed that the coordination is by far the most supported dimension of the 3C model, while communication is the less explored. It also showed that workspace awareness elements play a central role on DSD collaboration.
Taking into account the number of works and studies developed, without any doubt, group awareness constitutes one of the keystones for designing and implementing a groupware application. This research focuses on the design and the development of a Group Awareness Knowledge based System (GAKS) whose aim is to provide elaborated and innovative awareness functions to enhance coauthoring of documents on the World Wide Web.The developed advanced awareness functionalities follow and take advantages of the knowledge based system principles to provide: (1) a synchronous/asynchronous contextual communication tool (related to coauthors’ productions and interests), and (2) a detector of physical/logical work proximity that allows users to efficiently produce and coordinate their actions.
The developers’ physical distribution in Global Software Development (GSD) imposes challenges related to awareness support during collaboration. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the literature that describes studies that improve awareness support in a GSD scenario, identifying which of the dimensions of the 3C model, namely communication, coordination, and cooperation, are supported by these studies. Results indicate that coordination is far the most explored dimension, while awareness support in communication is very poorly studied. The research also identified a high number of tools introduced in the GSD domain and some new research opportunities.
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 PIÑAS 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-author’s cooperative environments to allow them collaborate closer. Thus, this user associated inference engine captures the application events corresponding to author’s actions,and uses its knowledge and rule bases,to detect co-author’s 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.
Providing information about other users and their activites is a central function of many collaborative applications. The data that provide this "presence awareness" are usually automatically generated and highly dynamic. For example, services such as AOL Instant Messenger allow users to observe the status of one another and to initiate and participate in chat sessions. As such services become more powerful, privacy and security issues regarding access to sensitive user data become critical. Two key software engineering challenges arise in this context:Policies regarding access to data in collaborative applications have subtle complexities, and must be easily modifiable during a collaboration.Users must be able to have a high degree of confidence that the implementations of these policies are correct.In this paper, we propose a framework that uses an automated verification approach to ensure that such systems conform to complex policies. Our approach takes advantage of VeriSoft, a recent tool for systematically testing implementations of concurrent systems, and is applicable to a wide variety of specification and development platforms for collaborative applications. we illustrate the key features of our framework by applying it to the development of a presence awareness system.
New research and a prototype implementation solve some fundamental
problems in distributed, real-time, cooperative editing in the Internet
environment. The REDUCE system's strategies include a novel consistency
model and responsiveness techniques that permit arbitrary order in
executing independent operations
Groupware reflects a change in emphasis from using the computer to solve problems to using the computer to facilitate human interaction. This article describes categories and examples of groupware and discusses some underlying research and development issues. GROVE, a novel group editor, is explained in some detail as a salient groupware example.
The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely-dispersed working g roups. The Basic Support for Cooperative W ork (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realise this potential t hrough development of Web-based tools which p rovide c ross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing Web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, the BSCW Shared Workspace system—a ce ntralised cooperative a pplication integrated with an unmodified Web server and accessible from standard Web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through 'shared workspaces'; small repositories in which u sers can up load documents, hold threaded discussions, and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The c urrent version o f the system i s described in d etail, including design choices resulting from use of the Web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.
Groupware reflects a change in emphasis from using the computer to solve problems to using the computer to facilitate human interaction. This article describes categories and examples of groupware and discusses some underlying research and development issues. GROVE, a novel group editor, is explained in some detail as a salient groupware example.
Currently, the World Wide Web environment provides support mostly for single-user authoring and browsing. Even though initiatives such as WebDAV have been proposed, there is still no adequate support for cooperative authoring of WWW documents that deals with the unreliability of such a distributed environment. We present the PINAS platform which provides means for supporting cooperative authoring on the Web. Using cooperative authoring applications built using the services of this platform, several users can create shared Web documents in a consistent and controlled way. PINAS provides several interesting features, such as: author identification, document and resource naming, document composition and management, document replication, consistency and storage. We propose seamless extensions to standard Web services that can be fully integrated within the Web environment. In this way, a shared document can be edited using a distributed cooperative editor and be accessed, at the same time, from standard Web browsers