CoDoc: Multi-mode Collaboration over Documents

In software engineering as well as in any engineering domain, a way of customizing the collaborative work to various modes of collaboration, i.e. synchronous and asynchronous, and the possibility of alternating these modes along the phases of a project is required. Our goal is to develop a universal information platform that can support collaboration in a range of application domains, the basic sharing unit being the document. Since not all user groups have the same conventions and not all tasks have the same requirements, this implies that it should be possible to customize the collaborative environment at the level of both communities and individual tasks. In this paper we present the consistency maintenance models underlying the synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration. We highlight the importance of choosing a general structured model of the document and particularly analyze the multi-mode collaboration for two main representative types of documents: textual and graphical.