A Streaming Digital Ink Framework for Multi-party Collaboration

We present a framework for pen-based, multi-user, online collaboration in mathematical domains. This environment provides participants, who may be in the same room or across the planet, with a shared whiteboard and voice channel. The digital ink stream is transmitted as InkML, allowing special recognizers for different content types, such as mathematics and diagrams. Sessions may be recorded and stored for later playback, analysis or annotation. The framework is currently structured to use the popular Skype and Google Talk services for the communications channel, but other transport mechanisms could be used. The goal of the work is to support computer-enhanced distance collaboration, where domain-specific recognizers handle different kinds of digital ink input and editing. The first of these recognizers is for mathematics, which allows converting math input into machine-understandable format. This supports multi-party collaboration, with sessions recorded in rich formats that allow semantic analysis and manipulation of the content.