Integrating User- and System-Centric Perspectives into Collaborative Compound Document Authoring

Computer-supported collaborative work is increasingly common in our professional and personal life. However, the expectations and requirements of the users are frequently neglected when addressing the technological challenges associated with the development of a distributed collaboration system. The proposed collaboration environment employs an integrative approach to distributed compound document authoring, including both a user- and system-centric perspective on collaborative work. An interruption-free, reliable, and responsive shared work environment with a near real-time representation of the work of others is a core expectation from the users. In order to provide these features, a fine-granular, graph-based data representation has been developed to serve as the basis for this approach. The data representing individual compound document elements is partitioned over sets of three distinct nodes in the graph structure. This separation of metadata and payload data enables the precise attribution of editing operations while maintaining an adaptable and extensible data representation. User-specific preferences allow for the individualization of a user's work environment to account for personal preferences, requirements from the current collaboration scenario, or limitations of the employed computer system. Support for complex, data type-specific editing commands is integrated with a concurrent command application and Layered Consistency Management model. This enables a near real-time representation of the work of others, the preservation of the users' editing intentions, and the maintenance of a globally consistent data state. Intra- and inter-document relations retain semantic connections between distinct data structure elements. Together with an element's supplemental data, this related information enables additional, autonomous conflict resolution approaches and facilitates a comprehensive representation of the conflict in case of a manual resolution process. By integrating these functionalities into one coherent system, the users are provided with an unobtrusive, yet reliable and feature-rich distributed work environment able to actively support collaborative compound document authoring.