Security solution frames and security patterns for authorization in distributed, collaborative systems

Summarizes a high-level conceptual model of collaborative human-computer systems and describes an empirical study based on the model. The model is the first step in integrating many different ideas and approaches for research in active decision support systems. The development of the model is based on the premise that the designer of such systems must address two fundamental issues: how a collaborative system should behave in order to be effective, and what characteristics of humans and computers will promote increased joint effectiveness. The model integrates research from several areas including MIS/DSS, problem-solving, and cognitive systems engineering, in order to identify some key issues and provide guidelines for new research. The constructs of cognitive coupling and cognitive fit are developed in this paper. Preliminary findings of an empirical study that was designed to study the effects of different types of cognitive fit are presented. >

The concept of time in traditional distributed systems has been inherited in the Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) literature. The following assumptions have generally been made: (1) Events are atomic and their durations do not matter. (2) Total ordering of events can be achieved by some mechanical algorithm. (3) The relationship between events is determined solely by time (causal relationship). However, we observe that these assumptions are not appropriate if the goal is to faithfully preserve user intentions in collaborative systems. In particular, we discuss why and how these assumptions should be relaxed or removed in the design of collaborative editing systems.

Collaborative editing (CE) has been an area of continuous research since early days of CSCW. Various CE systems have been studied in academia as research vehicles to investigate key technical issues in building advanced collaborative applications. In recent years, CE techniques have been increasingly adopted and further developed in industry for supporting real-world Internet or Cloud-based CE systems/services, such as Google Docs, Codoxware, IBM OpenCoWeb, Novell Vibe, and SubEthaEdit. This workshop aims to bring together CE academic researchers, industry developers, and end-users to discuss and exchange ideas on contemporary issues in researching, developing, and adopting CE systems. We have successfully organized this workshop annually at CSCW-related conferences. This year's workshop focuses on CE issues and techniques for supporting complex real-world documents (including but not limited to rich text, xml, spreadsheet, 2D/3D digital media, CAD, video, etc.), and evaluation of CE systems for such complex real-world documents.

The primary goals in a synchronous, real-time collaborative editing system (RTCES) involve ensuring a high level of concurrent access (editability) to users while maintaining the properties of the CCI model (consistency, causality-preservation, and intention-preservation). The field of RTCES research has advanced in techniques to overcome some of the challenges inherent in the support of synchronous editing of a shared document via Operational Transformation (OT), however current OT techniques require high message and storage costs. Their performances degrade as the storage for past operations into history buffers increases. In this paper, we present a novel algorithmic framework for history buffer reduction, which minimizes the size of the history of operations and reduces storage overheads. We show how this algorithm can be pipelined within a hierarchical document tree, enabling for further efficiency and opportunities for intention preservation — currently a hard problem. Further, we show how to distribute this algorithm in a peer-to-peer RTCES and present empirical simulation results that demonstrate the validity of our approach. Our contributions are breaking new grounds in the field of synchronous collaborative editing.

Flash Flood is a natural disaster that floods away large area where there are dense presence of rivers. Bangladesh is one such country where people face this sudden flood problem and loses valuable assets using manual water level monitoring. The challenge lies in the sudden increase of water level once the flood water is in. We are proposing a distributed system using water level monitoring sensors named Shonabondhu. The sensing nodes are distributed all across the country and the servers that collect data from sensors are spread around various regions. The servers use a function of rainfall and current water level that indicate a particular gradient to that sensor. The gradient information among sensors are related using the water level and rainfall data over four years (2008 to 2011). This gradient information is updated and propagated when any kind of change is present near the source of the river. A communication abstraction is created to propagate sensitive information and periodic updates of current status. We have used actual sensors to monitor the water level in the river and have used emulated sensors to mimic the behavior in large distributed system. Our current system works as a proof of a concept system before the actual deployment of this system in collaboration of Water Development Board of Bangladesh.

Mismatch or best match? This book demonstrates that best matching of individual entities to each other is essential to ensure smooth conduct and successful competitiveness in any distributed system, natural and artificial. Interactions must be optimized through best matching in planning and scheduling, enterprise network design, transportation and construction planning, recruitment, problem solving, selective assembly, team formation, sensor network design, and more. Fundamentals of best matching in distributed and collaborative systems are explained by providing: Methodical analysis of various multidimensional best matching processes Comprehensive taxonomy, comparing different best matching problems and processes Systematic identification of systems hierarchy, nature of interactions, and distribution of decision-making and control functions Practical formulation of solutions based on a library of best matching algorithms and protocols, ready for direct applications and apps development. Designed for both academics and practitioners, oriented to systems engineers and applied operations researchers, diverse types of best matching processes are explained in production, manufacturing, business and service, based on a new reference model developed at Purdue University PRISM Center: The PRISM Taxonomy of Best Matching. The book concludes with major challenges and guidelines for future basic and applied research in the area of best matching.

This article explores the world of dependable systems, specifically focusing on system design, software solutions, and architectural decisions that facilitate collaborative work on shared text documents across multiple users in near real time. It aims to dive into the intricacies of designing robust and effective document collaboration software focusing on understanding the requirements of such a system, the working principle of collaborative text editing, software architecture, technology stack selection, and tooling that can sustain such a system. To examine the pros and cons of the proposed system, the paper will detail how collaborative text editing software can benefit from such an architecture regarding availability, elasticity, and scaling. The intricate nature of this system renders this paper a valuable resource for prospective investigations within the domain of dependable systems and distributed systems. This research first examines the requirements of a real-time collaboration system and the necessary core features. Then, it analyzes the design, the application structure, and the system organization while also considering key architectural requirements as the necessity of scaling, the usage of microservices, cross-service communications, and client–server communication. For the technology stack of the implementation, this research considers the alternatives at each layer, from client to server. Once these decisions are made, it follows system development while examining possible improvements for the issues previously encountered. To validate the architecture, a testing strategy is developed, to examine the key capabilities of the system, such as resource consumption and throughput. The conclusions review the combination of modern and conventional application development principles needed to address the challenges of conflict-free document replication, decoupled and stateless event-driven architecture, idempotency, and data consistency. This paper not only showcases the design and implementation process but also sets a foundation for future research and innovation in dependable systems, collaborative technologies, sustainable solutions, and distributed system architecture.

Tourism is one of the largest industries globally, which has experienced a significant increase in growth from year to year. Pandemic Covid-19 has had a significant impact on tourism in Indonesia, with a decrease in the number of tourists. It also has an impact on the income of the tourism sector. However, there are still opportunities for the recovery of the tourism sector by further enhancing the role of technology. Information technology allows each individual to collaborate among other individuals, such as collaboration in search, sharing and using the information. However, to plan a tour, using information technology alone is not enough. There needs to be a collaborative role between individuals in providing relevant information. This study aims to explain the role of the collaborative system in supporting tourism and the factors that affect the collaborative system. This paper used the Kitchenham Guideline, which consists of formulating review protocol, Generate Search Strategy, Define Inclusion and Exclusion criteria, Quality Assessment, and Data Extraction. Based on the selection, 15 articles came from several databases, including Scopus, Science Direct, IEEE, and ACM Digital Library. The results of the literature review state that collaborative systems in tourism can help improve tourism services by providing information to support travel planning decisions and support online travel experiences. The benefits of a collaborative system can also affect factors such as: sharing information, user identification, social experience, exploration, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social support, user experience and capabilities, effective service improvement, engagement, and enjoyment. From these factors, this study proposed a new conceptual model.

Yamata-no-Orochi is an authentication and authorization infrastructure across multiple service domains and provides Internet services with unified authentication and authorization mechanisms. In this paper, Yamata-no-Orochi is incorporated into a video distribution system to verify its general versatility as a multi-domain authentication and authorization infrastructure for Internet services. This paper also reduces the authorization time of Yamata-no-Orochi to fulfill the processing time constrains of the video distribution system. The evaluation results show that all the authentication and authorization processes work correctly and the performance of Yamata-no-Orochi is practical for the video distribution system.

Collaborative graphics editing systems in ubiquitous environment support users to join and leave the collaboration dynamically at any time. The shared workspace state of these users will be inconsistent for the modification of the other session members. It is therefore necessary to initialize the application instance of the latecomer with the current state. In this paper, we propose a rejoining scheme that is based on the user interest prediction algorithm we proposed. The scheme is efficient for latecomers to rejoin the collaborative design session. The scheme is realized in our prototype system of collaborative graphics editing system that can work well in ubiquitous environments.

Network delays can cause serious usability problems in real-time collaborative environment. Network resources such as bandwidth, etc. are still the bottleneck in real-time collaborative environment. In addition, collaborative messages in groupware system may have different requirements for network QoS and different network protocols behave distinct performances on reliability and network delay aspects. Thus, it seems unreasonable to use a single protocol to send all interaction data. We did some experiments to investigate the impact on collaborating process which produced by packet size and network QoS requirement of different message type in collaborative graphics editing environment. According to the message characteristic, all messages are divided into several different types and for each type, suitable network protocols are used for exchanging information. Some experiments are made to test the usability of this integrated transmitting model.

We are developing WFE, a system for Real-Time Collaborative Editing (RTCE) for existing Web pages. We aim to enable several users to perform simultaneous modifications on existing Web pages in their browsers, while modified contents are reflected to other users in real-time. In this paper, we present the application of WFE to a cloud computing environment as well as its advantages. The environment chosen is Google App Engine, which is a platform for developing Web applications. Our comparison experiments show that we can achieve this by using push technology to perform synchronization.

Wikis, a popular tool for sharing knowledge, are basically collaborative editing systems. However, existing Wiki systems offer limited support for co-operative authoring, and they do not scale well, because they are based on a centralised architecture. This paper compares the well-known centralised MediaWiki system with several peer-to-peer approaches to editing of wiki pages: an operational transformation approach (MOT2), a commutativity-oriented approach (WOOTO) and a conflict resolution approach (ACF). We evaluate and compare them, according to a number of qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Automatic Detection of Copies Divergence in Collaborative Editing Systems

Recent advances in computer device design led to new research breakthroughs in the area of augmented reality(AR). A wide range of new applications emerged for use in daily tasks. Due to the AR achieved maturity and robustness, more research efforts are devoted to open challenges including application usability. As such, this article presents and adopts a number of usability heuristics for use in the particular case of collaborative distributed augmented reality systems. In order to validate the proposed heuristics, a case study for an industrial maintenance system is considered. The resulting testbed is seen as a low cost AR application scenario due to its use of off-the-shelf user mobile devices. The main contributions of the present research are: the formal process to conceive a heuristics' list, the proposed heuristics' list for collaborative remote AR systems, and a first refinement of the heuristics through an experiment with a functional prototype based on alow cost collaborative remote AR model.