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Vol: 60(74) No: 2 / June 2015 New Methods for the Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Collaborative Environment Bogdan Ionescu Mgestyk Technologies, Inc., 80 Aberdeen Street, Suite 220, K1S 5R5, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, phone: 613) 591-1210, e-mail: bogdan@mgestyk.com, web: http://www.mgestyk.com Cristian Gadea NCCT Laboratory, University of Ottawa, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 161 Louis Pasteur, Room B-306, K1N 6N5, Ottawa, Canada, phone: (613) 562-5800 , e-mail: cgadea,@ncct.uottawa Bogdan Solomon NCCT Laboratory, University of Ottawa, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 161 Louis Pasteur, Room B-306, K1N 6N5, Ottawa, Canada, e-mail: bsolomon@ncct.uottawa Mircea Trifan NCCT Laboratory, University of Ottawa, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 161 Louis Pasteur, Room B-306, K1N 6N5, Ottawa, Canada, e-mail: mircea@ncct.uottawa.ca Vasile Stoicu-Tivadar Politehnica University of Timisoara, Piata Victoriei nr. 2, Timisoara 300006, Romania, phone: +40 256 403 000, e-mail: vasile.stoicu-tivadar@aut.upt.ro, web: http://www.aut.upt.ro/~tivadar/ Keywords: collaborative environments, real-time web collaboration, groupware, document co-editing, synchronized workspace Abstract Collaborating while working, playing, studying, or exercising embraces many forms, ranging from simple emails to real-time workspaces on the web. Among the most difficult aspects in designing and implementing a web-based collaborative environment is the inclusion of real-time co-editing. This is due to the fact that a co-editing tool has to work well not only with text, but also with rich-text elements. In addition, the modern web places significant emphasis on audio, video, real-time data (such as sensor data) and interactive drawing features, all of which are also expected to function within the collaborative context. This paper presents an architecture that allows the real-time synchronization of text and multimedia content among a group of users. Multiple participants within a collaborative session are able to create and edit a variety of content at the same time. Collaborative rich-text editing is made possible by a unique HTML-based operational transformations approach that can be extended through “Smart Objects”. Such objects enable the synchronization of other embedded content and any required interactive functions of the content. An example implementation of the proposed architecture shows how multiple users can collaborate over a rich-text document containing a synchronized video player while also making use of advanced chat functionality. References [1] T. Mei, Y. Rui, S. Li, and Q. Tia, “Multimedia Search Reranking: A Literature Survey”, ACM Computing Surveys, 2012. [2] (2015) Google Docs - Online Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations. Google Inc. [Accessed: November 2015]. [Online]. Available: http://docs.google.com/. [3] K. István, A. Guth, and R. Klamma. “Shared editing on the web: A classification of developer support libraries,” in Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (Collaboratecom), 2013 9th Int. Conf. on, pp. 468-477, IEEE, 2013. [4] W. Robbins and S. Dustdar, \"Collaborative Computing,\" in Encyclopedia of Multimedia. USA: pp. 67-74, Springer, 2008. 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