PIÑAS: Supporting a Community of Co-authors on the Web

To provide efficient support for collaborative writing to a community of authors is a complex and demanding task, members need to communicate, coordinate, and produce in a concerted fashion in order to obtain a final version of the documents that meets overall expectations. In this paper, we present the PIÑAS middleware, a platform that provides potential and actual collaboration spaces, as well as specific services customized to support collaborative writing on the Web. We start by introducing PIÑAS Collaborative Spaces and an extended version of Doc2U, the current tool that implements them, that integrate and structure a suite of specialized project and session services. Later, a set of services for the naming, identification, and shared management of authors, documents and resources in a replicated Web architecture is presented. Finally, a three-tier distributed architecture that organizes these services and a final discussion on how they support a community of authors on the Web is presented.