AllianceWeb: cooperative authoring on the WWW

Abstract

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.