Collaborative writing

Abstract

Traditional computer applications have been designed to be run by one user at a time who does work in a single medium such as ASCII text and very little regard has been given to the fact that people often work together Single user computer applications also create barriers to group collaboration and they are normally used only passively by the group to store retrieve and present data If group members need to work on the same item for example a document in most cases they must work in an interleaved fashion to prevent inconsistency With the recent development of computer networks and the widespread deployment of networked workstations automating the group writing process for geographically distributed users has become feasible There is thus a growing interest in a new generation of multi user computer applications which assist groups of people working together supporting collaboration even if the team members are geographically distributed These new tools have been categorized under the name of Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW Another new eld that has emerged over the past few years is that of multimedia Multimedia applications allow the user to manipulate information in such diverse media as traditional ASCII text graphical text graphics still images and audio and video communication A software package which supports distributed real time multimedia CSCW known as the Distributed Collaborative Writing Aid DCWA is introduced The DCWA has ve major parts but the emphasis of this report is on the DCWA s distributed database which is crucial to making the entire system work together both logically and consistently The database s design and implementation is described from the initial prototype through the second version The second version s database is a specialized distributed program based on the client server model implemented in C running under BSD Unix It provides many management capabilites unique for a multimedia CSCW environment in addition to many conventional database functions