Collaboration on the Web

Tim Berners-Lee

MIT Lab for Computer Science

DARPA IP&V meeting 9 Oct 1996

Orginal goals of WWW

• Working together through shared knowledge
• Capturing group state
• Machine analysis
• see Bush, Englebart ... still to be implemented.

Plan A (1990)

• very easy hypertext editing
• brain - web equilibrium
• capture process, not constrain

Problems

• Lack of editing,
• Increasing sophistication of documents
• Lack of collaboration functions

Plan B (1996)

• Push toward easy start editing
• Push toward annotation functions
• Leverage PICS servers for annotation
• Held W3C workshop for shopping list of needs

Needs

• Share knowledge - with semantics
• Need notification of change built into web
• Structuring aids
• Better access control - trust web
• Integration with audio and video and whiteboard
• Whatever happened to group editors?
• Manipulable objects merge wiht distributed simulation?