WikiTable: A new tool for collaborative authoring and data management

Abstract

Tables are an efficient tool for organizing complex data. Even though they are pervasively used in all kinds of documentation, current implementations of tables often limit the power of data management because generally they do not support concurrent collaborative authoring; they only allow keyword search, which typically yields poor search performance; and transporting tables among different applications is cumbersome. We present a new table tool, WikiTable, which permits multiple users to work on the same table simultaneously. The content of each table is stored in a database, which enables accurate data inquiry. More importantly, WikiTable is highly portable, permitting easy integration with other applications, such as Wikis or Blogs. An effort to apply the WikiTable in a global collaboration project of software development is also discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.