Related work

I thought I'd share some related papers and systems I have heard about from
the Hypertext'97 and WWW6 conferences.

First, is a paper presenting a case study of use of a document management
system combined with a release process to manage content for a financial
services Web site.

"Industrial Strength Hypermedia using Document Management and Web Technologies"
V. Balasubramanian, Alf Bashian & Daniel Porcher
PDF:  http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ht97/pdfs/balasub.pdf

Abstract:

Merrill Lynch has initiated a major effort called the Trusted Global
Advisor to provide
instantaneous access to current financial information to about 20,000
financial consultants and other professionals across the corporation. As
part of this effort, marketing information about products and services will
be delivered to financial consultants, clients, and the general public
through an intranet and the Internet. A number of researchers have reported
on the requirements for industrial strength hypermedia. In this paper, we
present a case study on how we have designed a
large-scale hypermedia authoring and publishing system using document
management and Web technologies to satisfy our authoring, management, and
delivery needs. We describe our systematic design and implementation
approach to satisfy requirements such as a distributed authoring
environment for non-technical authors, templates, consistent user
interface, reduced maintenance, access control, version control,
concurrency control, document management, link management, workflow,
editorial and legal reviews, assembly of different views for different
target audiences, and full-text and attribute-based information retrieval.
We also report on design tradeoffs due to limitations with current
technologies. It is our conclusion that large scale Web development should
be carried out only through careful planning and a systematic design
methodology.


Next, there is a paper describing the Notification Service Transfer
Protocol (NSTP), which provides a messaging infrastructure for performing
synchronous collaboration via the Internet.  This is research performed at
the Lotus Development Corp.  The first author of this paper is Mark Day, a
contributor to this mailing list.

"The Notification Service Transfer Protocol (NSTP): Infrastructure for
Synchronous Groupware"
Mark Day, John F. Patterson, David Mitchell
http://proceedings.www6conf.org/HyperNews/get/PAPER80.html

Abstract:

The Notification Service Transfer Protocol (NSTP) is an infrastructure for
building synchronous groupware. It is based on the idea of a coordinating
notification server that is independent of any given synchronous groupware
application. NSTP is intended in some ways to be the synchronous analog of
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). We describe the features of NSTP,
emphasizing similarities and differences with respect to HTTP, and present
our rationale for including those features.


More information on NSTP can be found at: http://nstp.research.lotus.com/
including a paper presented at the CSCW'96 conference, and the protocol
definition specificaiton.


Finally there is the PowWow system, developed by Crystaliz, Inc., which is
a change management system for the WWW.  PowWow is described in the
following paper which was discussed at the Object-Oriented Web Servers and
Data Modeling workshop at WWW6.

"PowWow(TM) - A World Wide Change Management System"
Karen MacArthur, Sankar Virdhagriswaran, Gordon Dakin, Mike Webb
http://www.crystaliz.com/WWW6/workshop.htm

Abstract:

This document outlines problems encountered in representing and managing
data distributed across the web, and presents a system designed to address
these problems.

PowWow is a web-based system for managing a distributed set of web objects.
Using a set of metadata objects over a body of data, PowWow provides a
structure for tracking, changing, and moving this data. Further, PowWow
uses the metadata framework to provide tools to manage this web information
through the development process. Among the processes supported by the
metadata framework are version control, workspace management, distributed
build, configuration management, and process control.

Developers using PowWow can create, access, and change web objects (defined
as any web-accessible data) between local development environments and
remote sites, using the web and using their existing web development tools
and environments. By implementing these change management systems using
metadata over a shared data space distributed across the web, PowWow takes
advantage of ongoing web developments in the naming and sharing of data,
and of the body of useful tools for developing web objects.


More information on PowWow can also be found at:
http://www.crystaliz.com/PowWow/PowWow.html


- Jim

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 1997 20:44:02 UTC