Abstract
We describe a new collaborative technology that bridges the gap between ad hoc collaboration in email and more formal collaboration in structured shared workspaces. Our approach is based on the notion of object-centric sharing, where users collaborate in a lightweight manner but aggregate and organize different types of shared artifacts into semi-structured activities with dynamic membership, hierarchical object relationships, as well as real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We present a working prototype that implements object-centric sharing on the basis of a replicated peer-to-peer architecture. In order to keep replicated data consistent in such a dynamic environment with blended synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, we designed appropriate consistency control algorithms, which we describe in detail. The performance of our approach is demonstrated by means of simulation results.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Belotti, V., N. Ducheneaut, M. Howard and I. Smith (2003): Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email Tool. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI. Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA, pp. 345–352.
Bernstein, A. (2000): How Can Cooperative Work Tools Support Dynamic Group Processes? Bridging the Specifity Frontier. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. Philadelphia, PA, USA, pp. 279–288.
Chu, Y., S.G. Rao, S. Seshan and H. Zhang (2001): Enabling Conferencing Applications on the Internet using an Overlay Multicast Architecture. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM. San Diego, CA, USA, pp. 55–67.
Cronin, E., B. Filstrup, A.R. Kurc and S. Jamin (2002): An Efficient Synchronization Mechanism for Mirrored Game Architectures. Proceedings of the NetGames. Braunschweig, Germany, pp. 67–73.
C. Diot B.N. Levine B. Lyles H. Kassem D. Balensiefen (2000) ArticleTitleDeployment Issues for the IP Multicast Service and Architecture. IEEE Network. 14 IssueID1 78–88 Occurrence Handle10.1109/65.819174
N. Ducheneaut V. Belotti (2001) ArticleTitleE-Mail as Habitat: An Exploration of Embedded Personal Information Management. ACM Interactions. 8 IssueID5 30–38 Occurrence Handle10.1145/382899.383305
Ducheneaut, N. and V. Belotti (2001): A Study of Email Work Activities in Three Organizations. Technical report, Working Paper, PARC, CA, USA.
Eclipse Project (2004): URL http://www.eclipse.org.
Edwards, W.K. and E.D. Mynatt (1997): Timewarp: Techniques for Autonomous Collaboration. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI. Atlanta, GA, USA, pp. 218–225.
Ellis, C.A. and S.J. Gibbs (1989): Concurrency Control in Groupware Systems. Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD. Portland, OR, USA, pp. 399–407.
Eudora Sharing Protocol (ESP) (2004): URL http://www.eudora.com/email/features/esp.html.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition) (2000): W3C Recommendation, available at http://www.w3c.org/TR/REC-xml.
Geyer, W. and L.-T. Cheng (2002): Facilitating Emerging Collaboration through Light-Weight Information Sharing. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. New Orleans, LA, USA, pp. 221–230.
Geyer, W., H. Richter, L. Fuchs, T. Frauenhofer, S. Davijavad and S. Poltrock (2001): A Team Collaboration Space Supporting Capture and Access of Virtual Meetings. Proceedings of the ACM SIGGROUP. Boulder, CO, USA, pp. 188–196.
Geyer, W., J. Vogel, L.-T. Cheng and M. Muller (2003): Supporting Activity-centric Collaboration through Peer-to-Peer Shared Objects. Proceedings of the ACM SIGGROUP. Sanibel Island, FL, USA, pp. 115–124.
Gnutella and Limewire (2004): URL http://www.limewire.com.
Groove Networks (2004): URL http://www.groove.net.
Gruen, D., S.L. Rohall, S. Minassian, B. Kerr, P. Moody, B. Stachel, M. Wattenberg and E. Wilcox (2004): Lessons from the ReMail Prototypes. ACM CSCW. Chicago, IL, USA.
D.R. Jefferson (1985) ArticleTitleVirtual Time ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 7 IssueID3 404–425 Occurrence Handle10.1145/3916.3988
JXTA (2004): URL http://www.jxta.org.
Kaptelinin, V. (2003): UMEA: Translating Interaction Histories into Project Contexts. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI. Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA, pp. 353–360.
Kerr, B. (2003): Thread Arcs: An Email Thread Visualization. Proceedings of the IEEE Info Vis. Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 27–35.
Kubi Software (2004): URL http://www.kubisoft.com.
L. Lamport (1978) ArticleTitleTime, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Communications of the ACM. 21 IssueID7 558–565 Occurrence Handle10.1145/359545.359563
Lotus Notes (2004): URL http://www.lotus.com/notes.
Mackay, W.E. (1988): More Than Just a Communication System: Diversity in the Use of Electronic Mail. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. Portland, OR, USA, pp. 344–353.
Mauve, M. (2000): Consistency in Continuous Distributed Interactive Media. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. Philadelphia, PA, USA, pp. 181–190.
M. Mauve J. Vogel V. Hilt W. Effelsberg (2004) ArticleTitleLocal-lag and Timewarp: Providing Consistency for Replicated Continuous Applications IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. 6 IssueID1 45–57 Occurrence Handle10.1109/TMM.2003.819751
McCaffrey, L. (1998): Representing Change in Persistent Groupware Environments. Technical report, Grouplab Report, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada.
Microsoft Outlook (2004): URL http://www.microsoft.com/outlook/.
Muller, M., W. Geyer, B. Brownholtz, E. Wilcox and D.R. Millen (2004): One Hundred Days in an Activity-centric Collaboration Environment. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI. Vienna, Austria.
Munson, J. and P. Dewan (1996): A Concurrency Control Framework for Collaborative Systems. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 278–287.
Neuwirth, C.M., R. Chandhok, D.S. Kaufer, P. Erion, J. Morris and D. Miller (1992): Flexible Diff-ing in a Collaborative Writing System. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pp. 183–195.
Rohall, S.L., D. Gruen, P. Moody and S. Kellerman (2001): Email Visualizations to Aid Communications. Proceedings of the IEEE InfoVis. San Diego, CA, USA, pp. 12–15.
C. Sun D. Chen (2002) ArticleTitleConsistency Maintenance in Real-Time Collaborative Editing Systems ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction,. 9 IssueID1 1–41
C. Sun X. Jia Y. Zhang Y. Yang D. Chen (1998) ArticleTitleAchieving Convergence, Causality Preservation and Intention Preservation in Real-Time Cooperative Editing Systems ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 5 IssueID1 63–108 Occurrence Handle10.1145/274444.274447
Sun, C., Y. Yang, Y. Zhang and D. Chen (1996): Distributed Concurrency Control in Real-Time Cooperative Editing Systems. Proceedings of the Asian Computing Science Conference. Singapore, pp. 85–95.
Vogel, J. (2004): Conflict Visualization for Collaborative Multi-user Applications. Technical Report TR-04-003, Department for Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Mannheim, Germany.
Vogel, J. and M. Mauve (2001): Consistency Control for Distributed Interactive Media. Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia. Ottawa, Canada, pp. 221–230.
J. Vogel M. Mauve V. Hilt W. Effelsberg (2003a) ArticleTitleLate Join Algorithms for Distributed Interactive Applications ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems. 9 IssueID4 327–336 Occurrence Handle10.1007/s00530-003-0103-6
Vogel, J., J. Widmer, D. Farin, M. Mauve and W. Effelsberg (2003b): Priority-Based Distribution Trees for Application-Level Multicast. Proceedings of the NetGames. Redwood City, CA, USA, pp. 140–149.
Whittaker, S. and C. Sidner (1996): Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI. Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 276–283.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vogel, J., Geyer, W., Cheng, LT. et al. Consistency Control for Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaboration Based on Shared Objects and Activities. Comput Supported Coop Work 13, 573–602 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-004-5064-6
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-004-5064-6