PINAS 2001

This work, which set out to design and build a cooperative environment, began with a study of the principles that should guide future cooperative editing systems for the Web. The resulting cooperative editing environment, AllianceWeb, let Internet users move from consuming information to producing it: authors spread across the Internet cooperate on shared, distributed and replicated documents. That first cooperative application revealed what support cooperative work on the Web actually requires, and the research then turned to middleware infrastructures for such support. The work focused on the design and development of the PIÑAS platform, a generic middleware built on top of Web technology providing replication, update and consistency of objects — whether modified as a whole or fragment by fragment — under a range of policies suited to the nature of each object, together with support for nomadic and degraded-mode working.