Leveraging single-user applications for multi-user collaboration

Xia, Shiqiang; Sun, David; Sun, Changyin; Chen, David; Shen, Haifeng

doi:10.1145/1031607.1031635

Cited by 93 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…CoWord [8] is a plug-in that supports collaborative editing of Microsoft Word documents. It uses Transparent Adaptation (TA) approach for converting each high-level operation to a sequence of primitive operations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing rich content wikis with real‐time collaboration

Ignat

André

Oster

2017

Concurrency and Computation

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SUMMARYWikis are one of the most important tools of Web 2.0 allowing users to easily edit shared data. However, wikis offer limited support for merging concurrent contributions on the same pages. Users have to manually merge concurrent changes and there is no support for an automatic merging. Real-time collaborative editing reduces conflicts as the time frame for concurrent work is very short. In this paper, we propose extending wiki systems with real-time collaboration. We propose an automatic merging solution adapted for rich content wikis. Our solution relies on an operational transformation algorithm defined for high level operations that capture user actions such as move, merge and split. Copyright c 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.KEY WORDS: CSCW; collaborative editing; operational transformation; wiki INTRODUCTIONThe Web 2.0 era is associated with the growing success of participatory collaborative tools for public users. Enterprises have integrated a part of these tools in their information systems to improve their productivity and to facilitate the emergence of a form of collective intelligence.Among these tools, wikis efficiently share and structure a large amount of knowledge. Wikis are interlinked pages of rich text. Any user can view and edit these pages. For instance, a software development team can dedicate a wiki page to the minutes of their meetings, another one to their bug reports and a last one to the progress of their development. This way, everybody can keep an eye on when is the next meeting, who will attend, the minutes of a previous meeting, what are the bugs found or fixed, and the completed work on the project. Moreover, a wiki allows fast updates and everybody can edit the content without any restriction. A wiki offers all these features in a single tool.However, most existing wiki systems such as MediaWiki do not automatically merge parallel modifications on the same page. This becomes critical when changes have to be performed very quickly. A typical example is breaking news, when it is common that hundreds of people contribute to the same related Wikipedia pages in a very short amount of time. If two users are concurrently editing the same article, when they try to save their changes, the changes of only one user are published. The other user will be presented with two versions of the wiki page: the one that the user tried to publish and the recently published version. Conflicts, i.e. concurrent changes on the same article, have to be manually resolved by users by retyping or copying and pasting the changes they performed in the last version that was published. Moreover, users are unaware of other concurrent updates on the same article until they try to publish their own changes. Resolving conflicts might become very tedious, and this can be critical when a change has to be published almost instantly. * Correspondence to: Inria Centre Nancy -Grand Est, 615 rue du Jardin Botanique, 54600 Villers-lès-Nancy, FR. Email: claudia.ignat@inria. Ignat et al. [1,2,3,4] highlight the fact that co...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing rich content wikis with real‐time collaboration

Ignat

André

Oster

2017

Concurrency and Computation

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“…The method, adopted to leverage commercial single-user Microsoft Visio for multi-user real-time collaborations, is known as Transparent Adaptation (TA) approach, which was first proposed by CoWord and CoPowerPoint projects [24], [26]. TA is based on the use of the single-user applications' APIs to intercept and replay users' operations, so it requires no access or change to the applications' source codes (thus being transparent).…”

Section: B Covisio Componentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining constraints expressed as formulas in collaborative systems

Lin

Chen

Dromey

et al. 2007

2007 International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2007)

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Abstract-Constraints allow users to declare relationships among objects and let the constraint systems maintain and satisfy these relationships. Formulas have been adopted to express constraints in a wide variety of single-user applications, because of their simplicity, efficiency and manageability. The needs and benefits of supporting formula-defined constraints in collaborative environments have long been recognized. However, maintaining both constraints and consistency in the presence of concurrency in collaborative systems is a challenge. In these systems, users may concurrently define formulas, which could result in that different formulas are defined to express the same objectattribute at different sites. In this article, we discuss the issues and techniques in maintaining formula-defined constraints in collaborative systems. In particular, we also proposed a method that is able to maintain both constraints and system consistency in concurrent environments based on the existing consistency maintenance approaches. This method extends the application of these approaches from collaborative systems without constraint to systems that support formulas. The proposed method has been applied to implement a collaborative Visio system, called CoVisio, which leverages single-user Microsoft Visio for multi-user collaboration. Specific issues related to CoVisio are also discussed in detail.

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“…TA is an innovative approach to converting exiting or new single-user applications for multi-user real-time collaboration, without changing the source code of the original application [21]. The TA approach is based on a replicated system architecture where the shared singleuser application is replicated at all collaborating sites, the use of the single-user application's API (Application Programming Interface) to intercept and replay the user's interactions with the shared application, and the use of the OT technique to manipulate the intercepted user operations for supporting responsive and unconstrained (i.e.…”

Section: Basics Of the Ta Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The OAT technique is devised in the Transparent Adaptation (TA) [21] framework, which is able to convert single-user commercial applications into collaborative versions without changing the source code. This framework provides the necessary technical infrastructure for implementing the OAT technique and facilitates the application of the OAT technique to a range of existing commercial single-user applications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%