DC2S: A Content Management Infrastructure for Distributed Collaborative Environments

In the field of academic research, collaborative computing is of fundamental importance for providing a common workspace and a pool of shared resources that can be accessed regardless of temporal and geographical distances. However, providing a distributed collaborative environment that encompass different institutions is not an easy task, since many issues must be addressed. This paper presents a model for collaborative content management in multi-institutional distributed environments which aims to simplify the development of collaborative applications. It also presents a middleware built upon this model that provides a protocol for maintaining data consistency, allowing concurrent edition of shared content. The middleware also supply a set of services that leverages the available disk space of shared resources among the cooperating institutions for storing collaborative content in a distributed way, also providing reliability, fault tolerance, and security mechanisms.