Concurrency-Based and User-Centric Collaboration for Distributed Compound Document Authoring

The collaborative authoring of complex document structures by geographically distributed users is no longer a special case in today's global economy or people's personal lives. However, integrating single-user application responsiveness and feature sets with the additional demands and expectations presented towards distributed multi-user environments remains a challenge. Current solutions approaching this challenge almost exclusively rely on traditional, file-based data structures. This often introduces arbitrary workflow restrictions to the user and reduces the potential to benefit from an otherwise inherently concurrent system. Our distributed compound document authoring environment aims at addressing these challenges while providing system-level collaboration support to the user. We attain this through the close integration of a fine-grained data structure with a highly scalable, priority-based concurrency model for command distribution and application. This paper discusses our enhanced data representation and concurrency model together with the evaluation of their prototypical implementation.