PINAS: a middleware for Web distributed cooperative authoring

Currently, the World Wide Web environment provides support mostly for single-user authoring and browsing. Even though initiatives such as WebDAV have been proposed, there is still no adequate support for cooperative authoring of WWW documents that deals with the unreliability of such a distributed environment. We present the PINAS platform which provides means for supporting cooperative authoring on the Web. Using cooperative authoring applications built using the services of this platform, several users can create shared Web documents in a consistent and controlled way. PINAS provides several interesting features, such as: author identification, document and resource naming, document composition and management, document replication, consistency and storage. We propose seamless extensions to standard Web services that can be fully integrated within the Web environment. In this way, a shared document can be edited using a distributed cooperative editor and be accessed, at the same time, from standard Web browsers.