ZFlow: Workflow for Cooperative Editing System

Abstract

Enforcement of global cooperation urges the rapid growth of cooperative work. As a typical application of it, cooperative editing is widely used in many fields gradually, especially in knowledge intensive application. Workflow is a kind of automation technology by predefined process rules and tasks. It can bring us clarity in process control and management, which are two important facets in cooperative editing. Marriage of workflow and cooperation shows us an approach to achieve automation and convenient management as well as collaboration, thus gaining efficiency and regularity. We summarize the editing process flow as iterative phases including initializing, editing, coediting, reviewing and finalizing, which lays the foundation of incorporating workflow with cooperative editing. An activity-role based access control model, which uses activity to represent the editing task and uses role to effectively manage participants, is designed and applied in the workflow system. To get fine control grain, section, a logic part of the document, is used. We specially introduce the concept of subflow for section processing control and use section for cooperative editing control. To represent the workflow, we propose a workflow description language, which can be understood and processed by the workflow engine. As control logic in cooperative editing is quite different from that in individual editing, we put forward a novel workflow control algorithm, taking into account characteristics of cooperative editing. A temporal cooperative editing system applied the workflow system, showing it can deal with cooperative editing well, spare much human work, and offer clear process logic.