Providing Flexible Services for Managing Shared State in Collaborative Systems

Abstract

To effectively collaborate in Internet environments, it is critical to efficiently manage the shared state of collaboration. However, the management of shared state is highly situational

different collaboration semantics require different measures tailored to their specific needs. Hence, providing a general set of services that meet the management requirements of varying collaboration situations is challenging. In this paper, we discuss our approach to providing such services. The services are made flexible by allowing collaborators to choose appropriate services based on the needs of their collaboration tools and specific characteristics of their shared state. We present the shared state management services provided by our Corona server that embodies our approach and report experience with its use.