A Realistic and Efficient Distributed Infrastructure for Nomadic Web Cooperative Work

Currently, the Web environment provides support mostly for single-user browsing and authoring. Even though the WebDAV project proposed first solutions, there is still no adequate support for cooperative work that deals with the unreliability of such a distributed environment. We present the PIÑAS infrastructure which provides means for supporting cooperative work on the Web. Using groupware applications that are built employing the services of this infrastructure, several users can access and modify replicated shared entities in a consistent and controlled way. PIÑAS provides suited features, such as: user identification, multi-site user definition, user and entity naming, shared entity replication, storage, consistency, and automatic distributed updating. We propose seamless extensions to standard Web services that can be fully integrated within the Web environment. Moreover, the innovative PIÑAS features provide reliable support for temporarily disconnected and nomadic work.