In today’s information age, the availability and accuracy of large amounts of web-based information can be attributed to the creation and usage of various types of collaborative software. One type of collaborative software in particular, the wiki, allows groups of people to freely create and change articles of information. With a large base of users collaboratively making small changes to a broad range of articles, a broad variety of information can be created and maintained, which has been effectively demonstrated by the popular online encyclopedia www.wikipedia.org.

Our plan is to extend the ideas of the wiki and collaboration to the realm of technical documentation. Because multiple writers often create and simultaneously edit the same technical document before their release, we would like to create an integrated system where these writers and editors can discuss and collaborate on changes to documents.

One of our main design concerns is open collaboration. To this end we have selected XML Docbook as the open format for technical documents in our system. XML docbook is an open standard for describing documents with complex logical layouts. The primary work of this project involves creating a document editor which combines the ability to create XML Docbook documentation with the ability to attach comments and suggestions to specific sections of the document. The system will allow users to use other XML Docbook tools in collaboration with ours.

The main advantage of our software is the ability to attach comments to a part of a document or proposed change. To make this more convenient we will provide a web interface mostly focused on discussions. This will enable users to discuss the documents from any computer without special software.

By Aaron Sartor