Collaborative Editing

Networked computer systems offer much to support collaborative editing of shared documents among users. Software Engineering is one of many fields that benefits from computer-assisted collaboration as a myriad of developers, project managers, testers, and designers work together to develop large, complex systems that consist of a multitude of process and product artifacts. Multi-discipline and geographically-distributed production and research teams collaborate and co-author documents for businesses and universities worldwide. Such collaborations occur asynchronously via access to shared document repositories often assisted by configuration management systems and occur synchronously via shared, real-time collaborative editing systems often assisted by awareness-enhancing technology. Increasing concurrent access to shared documents by allowing multiple users to contribute to and/or track changes to these shared documents is the goal of collaborative editing systems; yet concurrent access is often limited in existing collaborative editing systems, and such systems are often specialized in their functionality and require users to adopt new, unfamiliar software to enable collaboration. Therefore, the purpose of this proposal is to (i) explore algorithms and functionality necessary to maximize concurrent access to shared documents, (ii) develop an architecture that allows for a heterogeneous set of client editing software to connect with a heterogeneous set of server document repositories, and (iii) develop a prototype system of our architecture that is responsive to users’ actions and minimizes communication costs.