Flexible notification for collaborative systems

Abstract

Notification is an essential feature in collaborative systems, which determines a system's capability and flexibility in supporting different kinds of collaborative work. In the past years, various notification strategies have been designed for different systems. However, the design of notification components has been ad hoc, and the techniques used for supporting notification have been application-dependent. In this paper, we contribute a flexible notification framework that can be used to describe and compare a range of notification strategies used in existing collaborative systems, and to guide the design of notification components for new collaborative systems. The framework has been applied to the design of a notification component for a group editor, which uses a single notification mechanism to support various notification policies for meeting both real-time and non-real-time collaboration needs. In addition, a new operational transformation control algorithm has been devised in combination with the notification component, which is significantly simpler and more efficient than existing algorithms.