Abstract

For the efficient co-authoring of multimedia documents in a distributed systems environment, the cooperative-work management systems that can not only allow the sharing of distributed resources but also facilitate the authors' interaction, are needed. In this paper, we present a cooperative-work management system with hybrid architecture, called CW-MAN, in which the information on shared objects and co-authoring management is stored in a dedicated computer system but the shared objects distributed all over the local computer systems. The main management functions provided by the CW-MAN are those for shared objects, session, and telepointing. The shared-object use them exclusively. The session managements allows authors to dynamically create, update, and destroy sessions. Lastly, the telepointing management allows local pointing events to be synchronously presented to remote systems.

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