Towards multi-granular versioning support for collaborative design applications

Version control functionality has played an important role in the development of a variety of application areas including software development, computer aided design, and the authoring process. While version control technology has proven useful in these areas, its use to date has mainly been to support asynchronous development. There is a lot more potential in the technology, however, particularly in the area of supporting the development of applications that involve synchronous development activities. Through an expansion of existing version control functionality to include support for finer-grained objects, the potential of the technology can begin to be explored, and in particular its suitability for the support of the development of synchronous collaboration facilities can be studied.