3rd International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharin

Research Article

Shadow Document Sets for Synchronously-Aware Asynchronous Collaboration

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553822,
        author={Stavroula Papadopoulou and Moira C. Norrie},
        title={Shadow Document Sets for Synchronously-Aware Asynchronous Collaboration},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharin},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={COLLABORATECOM},
        year={2008},
        month={6},
        keywords={Authoring systems  Collaboration  Collaborative tools  Collaborative work  Computer science  Monitoring  Privacy  Prototypes  Radar  Writing},
        doi={10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553822}
    }
    
  • Stavroula Papadopoulou
    Moira C. Norrie
    Year: 2008
    Shadow Document Sets for Synchronously-Aware Asynchronous Collaboration
    COLLABORATECOM
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553822
Stavroula Papadopoulou1,*, Moira C. Norrie1,*
  • 1: Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, CH-8092 Switzerland
*Contact email: papadopoulou@inf.ethz.ch, norrie@inf.ethz.ch

Abstract

Although extensive research has been conducted in recent years to provide awareness information for collaborative authoring in synchronous and semi-synchronous modes, this is not the case for asynchronous collaboration. Users involved in collaborative writing tasks often choose to work in isolation in order to keep their changes private until committed. However, the fact that other users are unaware of these changes can result in unnecessary work being done by other users or conflicts to be resolved. We address this problem and propose a solution based on the notion of Shadow Documents. We monitor in real-time changes made to a document by all users working in privacy in order to compute and present awareness information based on the changes. We present our approach in detail, along with a prototype of a shared workspace for asynchronous collaboration based on Shadow Document Sets.