Collaborative authoring with document fragments and contracts

Research on collaborative authoring focuses on providing an adequate soft-ware environment for the authoring process. This poster describes our framework based on a web architecture as well as a modular document model and some interfaces from which it is possible to derive various authoring processes. We apply a structured document approach with a document model completed by fragment and contract definitions. This results in a check-out/check-in type of authoring processes where negotiation can take place during the document class definition, or during the document instantiation. We describe the general architecture of a document farm prototype which supports our framework.