Collaboration via Internet and Web

Abstract

Internet was originally created to make it possible to run programs on remote computers distributed over a variety of interconnected networks. In the next major advance, the Web was invented mainly to make access to documents on Internet as easy as possible. Current Web-related work - the Semantic Web - is motivated by the need for automated document processing. Although document access remains the Web’s main purpose, both the Internet and the Web have also always been extensively used for various forms of social interaction, perhaps most importantly for collaboration. With the universal spread of computing and advancing globalization, support for social interaction and collaboration is becoming ever more important and research and development in this area are intense. In this paper, we classify the main approaches to social interaction support, present a model of a powerful framework for collaboration, and give examples of several existing Internet- and Web-based applications that support parts of this model. We conclude by hypothesizing that a next step in Web development might be to use accumulated experience with ad hoc platform- dependent collaboration tools to develop a general Web framework supporting social interaction. This framework would advance the Web from its document- and data-centric present to a technology that supports collaboration and social interaction. We call this paradigm the Inhabited Web.