Extending WWW for Synchronous Collaboration

Abstract The World-Wide-Web (WWW), in conjunction with such tools as Mosaic, is an extremely effective mechanism for individuals to share distributed information. However, access to this information is unidirectional, asynchronous, and limited by a client/server model in which only predefined data are provided. We describe augmenting WWW to support bidirectional, synchronous collaboration between data producers and their consumers. This is accomplished by exploiting WWW's ease of access and use, and by incorporating a peer-to-peer model that provides real-time collaboration services.