How to balance flexibility and coordination? Service-oriented model and architecture for document-based collaboration on the Web

Frequently, distributed workgroups require the documenting of joint activities or collaborative authoring of documents comprising diverse resources, originating both from humans and the Web or enterprise systems. These creative collaborations involve ad hoc human interactions and unexpected changes which build an implicit situational process. Supporting such collaboration requires a balance between retaining flexibility of collaboration with space for individual creativity and the ability to coordinate the collaborative evolution of documents. Existing coordination approaches support (partial) automation of conventional business processes but are too inflexible for creative collaboration. Web-based collaboration tools do not explicitly drive coordination. In this paper, we provide a collaboration model for the coordinated creation of documents as an evolving composition of services embedded into a RESTful scalable architecture. Through a prototype we substantiate how the approach leads to intended output documents.