XWeb: An Architecture for Cross-modal Collaboration

We show how the XWeb architecture can support collaboration across disparate platforms using different interactive modalities. Our collaborative solution imposes limited compatibility requirements on clients and thus enhances the architecture’s scalability to the size of the Internet. The independence of the implementations of interactive clients and servers is essential for pervasive and cross-modal collaboration. Communication about data changes and reasoning about change conflicts can provide such a collaborative substrate. An algorithm for conflict resolution is given. It is shown how the XWeb architecture naturally supports synchronous session management across interactive modalities.