An integrated session and repository management approach for real-time collaborative editing systems

Real-time collaborative editing systems may be applied in collaborative activities with a quite spontaneous and impromptu style. In such application activities, the session awareness information is particularly important. One key technical issue in achieving this flexibility is how collaboration sessions are managed in the system. However, existing approaches to session management are unable to provide sufficient session awareness information. In this paper, we propose a novel Integrated Repository and Session Management (IRSM) approach for supporting real-time collaborative editing. IRSM supports lightweight session management to significantly reduce the overhead of explicit session initialization; and detailed session awareness information through the integration of session and repository management mechanisms. In addition, IRSM is application-independent, so it can be used to support a wide range of collaborative editing systems. The feasibility and generality of this approach has been demonstrated in two real-time collaborative editing systems: Co Word and CoPowerPoint.