• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.623-634
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a collaborative multimedia authoring system. Our authoring system represents a multimedia presentation in a 3D coordinate system. One axis represents the traditional timeline information (T-zone), and the other two axes represent spatial coordinates (XY-zone). Our system represents a visual media objects as a 3D parallelepipeds and audio media objects as cylinders. This interface allows for simultaneous authoring and manipulation of both the temporal and the spatial aspects of a presentation. Using our system, users can design multimedia presentations collaboratively in the unified spatio-temporal space while freely traversing the spatial domain and the temporal domain without changing the context of authoring. In addition, we suggest an efficient mechanism of concurrency control for shared objects generated by our collaborative writing system. The mechanism is mainly based on the user awareness, the multiple versions, and the access permission of shared objects. Our concurrency control mechanism is designed to keep data consistency by minimizing the collision due to the delay or the failure of network communication and to allow maximum responsiveness for users using optimistic concurrency control. Also, the mechanism maximize the responsiveness by refining the locking granularity and applying different concurrency control mechanisms to each.