Design and Implementation of Scientific Collaborative Editing Environment on Chemistry

Scientific collaboration is becoming more and more important in the e-science. As real-time collaborative editing allows geographically distributed users edit a same document synchronously, it could be one of the effective ways to support scientific collaboration. We designed a Scientific Collaborative Editing Environment (SCEE) so as to apply the real-time collaborative editing to the scientific collaboration. In the SCEE, we proposed a mechanism of transforming the editing operation to command and an editor extension point, which changed a legacy single-user scientific editor to a collaborative multi-user editor conveniently. Further more, after investigating the special requirements in chemistry collaboration, we developed a prototype of SCEE on chemistry, which integrated 2D collaborative molecular editor and a 3D collaborative molecular editor. The results show that this prototype makes the chemical collaboration more efficient and convenient, and following developers could develop other scientific collaborative editors more easily.