Increasing Awareness in Collaborative Authoring through Edit Profiling

Abstract

Awareness of the activities of other users and also document evolution is an important part of collaborative authoring. We introduce the concept of an editing profile that can be used to maintain and visualise measures of the changes made across a document by different users in both synchronous and asynchronous collaborative editing. It provides a simple means of making users aware of ¿hot areas¿ and also who is or has been active in various parts of the document, as well as a quick access point into parts of the document that have been changed. The profile can be adapted to display the most relevant information based on both user preference and situation.