Section: Software

Collaborative Tools

Participants : Abdessamad Imine, Asma Cherif.

The collaborative tools allow us to manage collaborative works on shared documents using flexible access control models. These tools have been developed in order to validate and evaluate our approach on combining collaborative edition with optimistic access control.

• P2PEdit. This prototype is implemented in Java and supports the collaborative editing of html pages and it is deployed on P2P JXTA platform(http://www.sun.com/software/jxta/ ). In our prototype, a user can create a html page from scratch by opening a new collaboration group. Other users (peers) may join the group to participate in html page editing, as they may leave this group at any time. Each user can dynamically add and remove different authorizations for accessing to the shared document according the contribution and the competence of users participating in the group. Using JXTA platform, users exchange their operations in real-time in order to support WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) principle. Furthermore, the shared html document and its authorization policy are replicated at the local memory of each user. To deal with latency and dynamic access changes, an optimistic access control technique is used where enforcement of authorizations is retroactive.

• P2PCalendar. To extend our collaboration and access control models to mobile devices, we implemented a shared calendar on iPhone OS which is decentralized and scalable (i.e. it can be used over both P2P and ad-hoc networks) [58] . This application aims to make a collaborative calendar where users can simultaneously modify events (or appointements) and control access on events. The access rights are determined by the owner of an event. The owner decides who is allowed to access the event and what privileges they have. Likewise to our previous tool, the calendar and its authorization policy are replicated at every mobile device.