Collaborative SVG as A Web Service

We present a reformulation of SVG and in particular the Batik browser in a Web service structure exploiting the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm. This work has two major goals; firstly it allows us to make a very flexible collaborative SVG browser exploiting our general approach for collaborative Web Services (http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/foxwmc03keynote.pdf). Secondly it shows how applications and in particular W3C DOM based applications can be built as Web Services in a case (the Batik SVG Browser) with a well written open source code space. Building applications as Web Services has several important features; it allows automatic generation of collaborative applications; it unifies distributed and local services; finally it allows easier customization of the user interface to support the needs of clients or users. We discussed the latter point in SVG OPEN 2002 (http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/projects/carousel/papers/draft.pdf), which described PDA interfaces to SVG. In this paper we focus on the Web Service SVG architecture and the structure of the associated event model. We believe that our analysis could suggest architecture of future office and visualization systems, which are built around object models like the W3C DOM.