Title: An integrated approach to version management, role-based access control and history maintenance in computer-supported collaborative writing
Abstract: Computer Supported Collaborative Writing (CSCWriting) is an interactive application that allows multiple, distributed users to collaborate on a shared document. To support interaction among users, many CSCWriting tools provide synchronous communication capability. However, synchronous communication alone cannot be employed successfully due to the slowness of typical network environments and various collaborative writing modes in which authors operate. These problems demand a new approach that aims at a simple, low-cost asynchronous collaboration environment such as a version control system. However, since most current version control techniques have been developed for single user environments, they can not be directly incorporated into the CSCWriting environments. That is, they do not have the capability to express social/cognitive information, such as group awareness and access control. This dissertation describes issues of various physical and social/cognitive aspects of version control in an asynchronous CSCWriting environment. Sub functions required in a version control system, such as differencing, merging, access control, and group awareness control are discussed in detail. Then we present the Activity Identification (AID) mechanism, the primary contribution of this research, which is designed to facilitate granularity control, version navigation, differencing, and merging. Its unique address scheme eliminates the requirement of large storage capacity for navigation. The system integrity is also enhanced since AID is incorporated into the document. Role-based access control is implemented by incorporating social roles in the merge table. With a merge table, users can change or update the merge policy at any time during the collaboration. Finally, the detailed architecture of the system and the implementation of a prototype system are also discussed in this dissertation.
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 2
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