An Experiment in “off the Shelf” Collaborative Editing

Various special-purpose tools attempt to support users in collaborative writing and editing tasks. Our approach has been to experiment with general-purpose tools and standards, familiar to larger communities, to determine what degree of support for collaborative editing “off the shelf” products could provide. The work focused on adapting relational database tools to coordinate users’ work and representing shared documents using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Thus, it is our hypothesis that “off the shelf” databases can be used as “collaboration servers” in a platform independent client / server environment of applications within different domains. A prototype simulating the intended behavior of the client / server architecture has been implemented to demonstrate the concept and reveal problems in the model. This paper summarizes our findings to date and discusses issues for future research.