CoLab: A New Paradigm and Tool for Collaboratively Browsing the Web

Abstract

Widespread adoption of Web technologies, particularly in professional and educational areas, has motivated new research efforts with the objective of designing new interaction mechanisms based on Web technologies. Within this framework, collaborative Web browsing (cobrowsing) aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users to "browse together" on the Web. Such a browsing paradigm can have many useful applications, for instance, in e-learning, for collaboratively searching and retrieving documents, and for online assistance (helpdesk). A cobrowsing system should provide all the facilities required for allowing users to establish and release, in a very simple and flexible way, browsing synchronization relations as well as interactions with continuous media presentations embedded within Web pages. This paper presents the design, modeling, and implementation of the cobrowsing system called CoLab. CoLab provides all the functionalities required for allowing users to collaboratively browse the Web, and a first experimental version of the tool has been implemented and is fully operational