A Transaction Model for an Open Publication Environment

Different users of a publication environment, e.g., authors, editors, layouters, typesetters, will together produce and distribute a publication. We consider three different kinds of components in such an environment: assistants, agents, and tools. Assistants provide users with homogeneous access to local tools, such as text editors, information bases etc. In addition, they support the cooperation between users. Agents provide direct access to non-local tools, originally available only to the assistants of other users. We propose a transaction model with the following properties: easy integration of existing tools, guarantee of ACID properties by assistants and agents if tools supporting ACID transactions are accessed, and a higher degree of parallelism compared to conventional transaction models.