Maintaining consistency among shared tasks in the web-based collaborative systems

Abstract

The web-based collaborative systems are emerging as effective means to coordinate and manage geographically dispersed users in multiple sites. Specifically, maintaining consistency among shared tasks in the web-based collaborative systems is increasingly emphasized to achieve synchronous collaboration as well as higher workgroup productivity. For the consistency maintenance in the intranet environment, dependency management with a certain security policy and change notification mechanisms are necessary. However, research on the intranet-based collaborative systems has not been yet satisfactory largely due to the lack of effective change management support and limitations of current web technologies such as unidirectional Hypertext Transfer Protocol(HTTP) which does not allow web servers to send messages to their web browsers without first receiving requests from them. This paper proposes a change management framework that can overcome such limitations and support synchronous collaboration in a web-based collaborative computing environment. A dynamic web server incorporating the proposed framework is also presented as a generic platform for developing web-based collaborative systems. The prototype system of the dynamic web server is developed on a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language.