Adaptive resource management in the PIÑAS web cooperative environment

Abstract

The PIÑAS Web cooperative environment allows distributed authors working together to produce shared documents in a consistent way. The management of shared resources in such an environment raises important technical issues due to the constraints imposed by Web technology. An elaborated group awareness function is provided that allows each author notifying his contributions to other authors, and controlling the way by which other contributions are integrated into his/her environment. In order to support this function, essential to every groupware application, we designed a self-adaptive cooperative environment. We propose a new way of structuring Web documents to be considered as independent resource containers with their corresponding management context. This representation of information simplifies the design of mechanisms to share, modify and update documents and their resources in a consistent and controlled way. Scenarios are used to motivate the need for robust mechanisms for the management of shared Web documents and to illustrate how the extensions presented address these issues.