Collaborative document edition in a highly concurrent environment

Up to date research on computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) focused mainly on the adaptation of collaboration models used in Intranet to the specificity of Internet. No collaboration model deals with the problem of high amount of data resulting from the high number of collaborators. In this paper, a model of document edition in highly concurrent environments is presented A document model based on multiversion databases is introduced. An overview of ultra-metrics and hierarchical classification is given, and the use of these techniques for edition process analyses is presented. The use of ultra-metrics in the edition process is discussed, both for simulations and automatic edition steering. Three examples of applications of the proposed document edition model are given