A chat-centric collaborative environment for web-based real-time collaboration

Synchronous, and real-time web-based collaboration on text and multimedia content is a hot research subject. Currently collaborative multimedia applications are loosely defined. It is current practice to consider any application that allows users to connect to each other in order to exchange information in writing or through video streams, in real-time, or near real-time, as a “collaborative application”. Thus, a large number of applications presently claim to be collaborative. From an abstract point of view, collaboration implies the real-time sharing of files, streams or real-time data (such as sensor data) synchronously. In this paper, a new chat-driven architecture for collaborative rich-text and media editing and consuming is introduced. The chat has a central role in coordinating group activities. The goal of the new platform is the production of information or content by one or all of the members of the group synchronously. Central to this new concept are operational transformations and collaborative “Smart Objects”. These objects are entirely web-based and contain information related to their embedding in the content, as well as interactive functions to assist the users in their collaborative work. Real-life experiments using this new platform are described at the end.