GlobIS: Global Information Systems Group

Collaborative authoring of various kinds of documents is central to a wide variety of projects and tasks. Existing collaborative editing systems tend to support only particular types of documents or applications. Some offer real-time collaborative editing where users editing the same document at the same time see the immediate effects of changes made by each other. Other systems let users work in isolation on local copies of a document and allow versions produced in parallel to be merged later when users publish their work in a shared repository. The goal of this project was to design a general framework that would allow the style of collaboration to be customised according to user preferences and roles as well as the task at hand. Thus users should be able to switch between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration at different stages of a project and even specify the levels of granularity at which access and conflict controls should be applied. Thus, in the earlier stages of a project, a user may be able to ensure sole access to an entire section of a document while later there may be no access controls and concurrent user operations are only considered to be in conflict if they edit the same word. Further the users should be able to work on the different types of documents involved in a project using similar models of collaboration. Central to our approach is a general hierarchical model of documents based on the syntactical structure of different document types. Operation histories are associated with the nodes of the hierarchical structure which results in improvements in both the performance and quality of conflict detection and resolution. To validate the approach and investigate domain-specific requirements, both synchronous and asynchronous collaborative editors for text, graphical and XML documents were developed in the project. We showed how existing operation transformation algorithms for consistency maintenance could be adapted to work with our model in the case of text and XML documents. In the case of graphical models, we showed that the adaptation of these algorithms raises a number of issues and developed a new algorithm based on the serialisation of operations as an alternative. (SNF Project 200021-101914, 2003-2007)

Generosa Enterprise

Presented at Zurich's Platzspitz park during the 150 Years ETH Zurich Jubilee, the project Generosa Enterprise offer visitors a good view of the Monte Generoso region in Ticino. Visitors can take part of an interactive game which has been designed by the artist Curt Walter Tannhäuser and the Global Information Systems group from ETH Zurich. The game will take them along a journey where they can experience the world of the Monte Generoso combining art, science and latest IT technology. »»

The Lost Cosmonaut

The Lost Cosmonaut is the working title of an art collaboration between Axel Vogelsang, Andrea Lioy and the Globis Lab at ETH Zurich. It is part of the program Artists in Labs by the HGK Zurich. This work is investigating several aspects of reading and writing in the context of human computer interaction. »»

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