Fine-grained addressability to support large-scale collaborative document development

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d10016818

The Web has made it possible for large, distributed collaborations to develop sophisticated document bases. As these collaborations increase in size, there is a need to support reference, navigation and search through the document bases by individuals who are not computer pro-fessionals. Although collaborative tools such as wikis have been developed that address some of the requirements of these communities, the tools lack support for simple and convenient fine-grained addressability to parts of the documents. Such addressability is essential for formal documents, such as standards and legal documents. In this thesis we develop a solution to the problem of fine-grained addressability that is based on MediaWiki, a popular and powerful col- laboration tool that is the software infrastructure for Wikipedia. Although some collaboration tools that support fine-grained addressability already exist, they have not addressed some of the open research issues of fine-grained addressability, such as dealing with transclusion, semantic annotation and hyperscope support. It also deals with the research problems that were raised by this goal. An architecture and reference implementation was developed to provide a proof of concept and to test the viability of the proposed solutions to the research problems. The thesis also discusses the various design decisions that were made in the course of solving the research problems and developing the reference implementation.