Database management for multimedia distributed collaborative writing

Abstract

Traditional computer applications have been designed to be run by one user at a time who does some work in a single medium, such as ASCII text, and very little regard has been given to the fact that people often work together. 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. In this paper, a software package which supports distributed, real-time, multimedia collaborative work, known as the Distributed Collaborative Writing Aid (DCWA), is described. The DCWA has five major parts but the emphasis of this paper is on the DCWA's distributed database, which is crucial to making the entire system work together both logically and consistently. The database is a specialized, distributed system based on the client-server model implemented in C++ running under 4.3BSD Unix and provides dynamic management capabilities unique for a multimedia collaborative working environment.