A Hypermedia Basis for the Specification, Documentation, Verification, and Prototyping of Concurrent Protocols

The Trellis project examines hypertext as a mechanism not only for structuring information, but also for structuring process. Process can be specified by a protocol, and the number of areas of study in which protocols are of relevance is large. In this paper we present the definition of a new Trellis model, an expansion of earlier models, that incorporates colored tokens into the previously-described timed-Petri-net-based definition. We give examples of using Trellis to define protocols in the areas of Software Engineering and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Trellis prototype implementations are based around a client-server architecture and interpret their specifications. Consequently they provide an environment for the rapid prototyping and incremental development of multi-user distributed protocols.

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