Collaborative Authoring of Hypermedia Documents

This paper identifies issues in computer-support for collaborative authoring of hyperdocuments and shows how SEPIA, a cooperative authoring environment, addresses these issues. First, hyperdocuments can be used to create and maintain technical documentation. Second, activity spaces support the cognitive and social processes involved in the creation of hyperdocuments. Third, a shared hyperdocument database, versioning, different modes of collaborative work, and awareness of the activities of other group members support asynchronous and synchronous distributed collaboration, as well as smooth transitions between them. Fourth, annotations can be used to communicate about drafts and plans. Although initial experience with SEPIA indicates that it provides strong dedicated support for collaborative writing of hyperdocuments, we identify annotations as one area where further improvement is possible and outline issues involved in providing better support for generating, receiving, and reacting to annotations.