Structured and Distributed Cooperative Editing in a Large Scale Network

In this chapter we discuss the advantages of a structured model of documents in a cooperative editor. The discussion is based on the experience gained in developing and using Alliance, a groupware application that allows several users distributed on a network to cooperate for producing documents in a structured way. In addition to the local editing functions made available on each site by a structured editor, the application provides such basic functionalities as management of document storage and remote access to distributed documents. It offers services for managing user interaction and cooperation, for dynamically distributing roles to users, for showing documents through multiple views, for controlling the consistency of modifications, for updating automatically all copies of shared documents, etc.