Introduction of CDH (Cooperative Document Handling) and its feasibility study on multimedia document conferencing system

With the great progress of computer technology, electronic documents have been widely used in the office environment. Especially, multimedia documents are becoming popular to be used for document generation, filing/retrieval and exchange. Furthermore, for the purpose of enhancing office communication, it is desired to realize multi-user communications, such as electronic document circulation, group editing and document conferencing. Considering the above background, ITU-T SG8 (International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standards Sector, Study Group 8) has started a new initiative called CDH (Cooperative Document Handling), which realizes multimedia document communications in multi-user environments. The main purpose of CDH is to specify new document communication services and to provide a framework for group communication based on standard techniques which have already been defined or are now being studied. Among the various types of document communication, CDH supports geographically distributed collaboration from a spatial point of view. On the other hand, CDH supports collaboration based on both synchronous and asynchronous communications from a temporal view point. In this paper, we introduce CDH, focusing on document formats and protocols. Furthermore, we have implemented and evaluated a multimedia document conferencing type of CDH, which we call "ODAWork" to show its feasibility by a standard approach.