Collaborative Construction of Artifacts

This paper describes an approach for collaborative construction of artifacts, such as e.g. graphical maps and annotatable text documents, without requiring write-access to a common single file. Our approach is applicable to any kind of artifacts that can be divided into separate contributions, where each one is authored and stored independently, and, on request, merged into the artifact. The goal is to move col- laboration issues from the files where artifacts are expressed, to an in- formation directory. This information directory manages information around artifacts and keeps track of existing contributions to artifacts. Our prototype of such an information directory, named Collaborilla, is designed to be a flexible service, which can be updated by anyone in a wiki-style manner. With this approach, viewing a collaboratively constructed artifact gives each viewer the control of including or ex- cluding various contributions. Moreover, each viewer can easily choose to participate and provide a new contribution to the artifact without the other authors being aware of this. If information about this new contribution is published in the Collaborilla directory, the contribution will also be seen by others.