Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Peer to Peer Optimistic Collaborative Editing on XML-like trees

Collaborative editing consists in editing a common document shared by several independent sites. This may give rise to conficts when two different users perform simultaneous uncompatible operations. Centralized systems solve this problem by using locks that prevent some modifications to occur and leave the resolution of confict to users. On the contrary, peer to peer (P2P) editing doesn't allow locks and the optimistic approach uses a Integration Transformation IT that reconciliates the conficting operations and ensures convergence (all copies are identical on each site). Two properties TP1 and TP2, relating the set of allowed operations Op and the transformation IT, have been shown to ensure the correctness of the process. The choice of the set Op is crucial to define an integration operation that satisfies TP1 and TP2. Many existing algorithms don't satisfy these properties and are indeed incorrect i.e. convergence is not guaranteed. No algorithm enjoying both properties is known for strings and little work has been done for XML trees in a pure P2P framework (that doesn't use time-stamps for instance). We focus on editing unranked unordered labeled trees, so-called XML-like trees that are considered for instance in the Harmony pro ject. We show that no transformation satisfying TP1 and TP2 can exist for a first set of operations but we show that TP1 and TP2 hold for a richer set of operations. We show how to combine our approach with any convergent editing process on strings (not necessarily based on integration transformation) to get a convergent process