Collaborative Web Browsing Tool supporting Audio/Video Interactive Presentations

Abstract

Collaborative Web Browsing aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users getting their browsing activities synchronized. A Collaborative Web Browsing system should provide all the necessary facilities to allow users to get synchronized and desynchronized in a flexible way, including both browsing actions and browser embedded presentations interactions. In this paper we present the modeling and implementation of our Collaborative Web Browsing system called CoLab 2. It implements the necessary functionalities that allow solving the problem of allowing users to collaboratively browsing the Web.

CoLab: A New Paradigm and Tool for Collaboratively Browsing the Web

“…Its main function is to guarantee the synchronization of audio/video presentations (streamed or downloaded) by forcing the same presentation state in all synchronous users' plug-in. As detailed in [18], this module maintains the current state of each continuous media presentation in the session based on "state change" messages sent by the "media controller" and controls the presentations states by sending "playback control" messages to the synchronous users. …”

“…The "broker" asks the "retriever" (15) for the retrieval of the resource, which itself asks the "cache module" to verify whether the resource is cached (16). Since the resource has already been stored in the cache, and this browsing action is the consequence of the synchronization of a browsing action, it is retrieved directly from the cache (17) and sent back to the "retriever" (18), which sends it back to the "broker" (19), finally satisfying the user's request (20). Fig.…”

“…This problem does not have a trivial solution. In [18], we survey some difficulties concerning the synchronization of collaborative continuous media presentations.…”