SEPIA: a cooperative hypermedia authoring environment

This paper addresses two main areas: 1) research on computer–based support for cooperative authoring and 2) research on cooperative hypermedia systems. This is done by reporting about the design, development, and implementation of SEPIA and presenting results on dedicated and comprehensive authoring functionality addressing also the new rhetoric of hypermedia, a hypermedia data model with composites, persistent and shared data storage for hypermedia, and support for cooperative work, esp. cooperative writing.We start by identifying the challenge of hypermedia authoring and production which serves as the driving force for our development. Using interacting problem spaces as the vehicle for modelling the dynamic aspects of authoring, we arrive at a set of requirements answered by the concept of “activity spaces”. The design of coherent hyperdocuments is facilitated by a “construction kit”. Furthermore, we describe the extensions and modifications necessary to support multiple authors with the cooperative version of SEPIA. Based on the requirements, we develop a system architecture and report on the implementation of the system. We describe the basis for access to shared hyperdocuments, the activity space browsers, the integration of multimedia functionality (audio, graphics, pictures), and the integration of an audio and video conferencing system. Finally, we report on more recent developments and future work.