Distributed authoring on the Web with the BSCW shared workspace system

Abstract

m We consider requirements for distributed authoring on the Web, based on experience with the BSCW Shared Workspace system. The BSCW system is an extension of a standard Web server, which provides a range of basic services for collaboration, including features for uploading documents of any type, remote editing, version management, group administration, access control and more, accessible from different platforms using unmodified Web browsers. We discuss the need for standards for Web-based distributed authoring and reveal our own application-level solutions as implemented in the BSCW system. he Web was originally intended to support a richer, more active form of information sharing than is currently the case. Early implementations at CERN allowed browsing of pages, as is common today, but also supported annotation and the addition of links between arbitrary pages, not just those on local servers, which the user could access and edit [Berners-Lee 1992]. Some of these concepts were carried through to early drafts of the standards for Web protocols, which describe features such as remote publishing of hypertext pages and check in/out support for locking documents, to ensure consistency in a multiauthor environment. To date, these aspects have largely been sidelined, while development of Web browsers, servers, and protocols has focused on the more “passive” aspects of information browsing. The emergence of tools like Netscape Composer (Gold) and America Online AOLpress suggest a return to the Web as the basis for more active information sharing. Such tools support WYSIWYG editing of Web pages and publishing to remote Web servers: a first step towards true distributed, cross-platform, collaborative authoring and annotation. These developments in turn raise questions about the support required for version management, consistency control, and the like, and how (and to what extent) this support should be provided through extension of the standard Web protocols. These questions are the focus of the work of the recently established IETF Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning. To provide input to these discussions, we describe our work with the BSCW Shared Workspace system [Bentley et al. 1997a; 1997b]. Conceived as a means to support dispersed work groups, BSCW provides features for sharing documents of any type by upload to a BSCW server. Simple locking and versioning services are also provided, and a basic event service informs users of the current state of the authoring process. BSCW integrates tools like Distributed Authoring on the Web with the BSCW Shared Workspace System