Cooperative HyperMedia Editing with CoMEdiA

CoMEdiA is a groupware tool which enables co-authors to cooperatively produce hypermedia documents. CoMEdiA allows co-authors to communicate their ideas, drafts, guidelines, constraints and annotations to other co-authors. It uses a mix of communication patterns, media and document organization to enable co-authors to keep on exchanging information (remotely or face-to-face), improving passages and modifying notes until a final document is achieved. We did not concentrate on the depth but on the breath of the features. Our efforts were in integrating and coordinating concepts from collaboration, multimedia and hyper organization rather than on making a specialized system in any of them. We began with the text medium and are now including bitmaps and raster images. Later sound and video will also be integrated. In this paper we describe and sustain the available capacities