InterDOC: reference architecture for interoperable services in collaborative writing environments

Groups that work on cooperative applications frequently construct and provide documents. Although these environments manipulate the same kind of artifact (a document), they are not usually interoperable due to the implementation of different policies, protocols or infrastructure. Therefore, it is hard for users to use different collaborative systems to work on a single shared document and share several necessary information for the accomplishment of a collaborative authoring process that the involved tools offer separately. Towards such an interoperation, we propose the InterDOC (environment for supporting interoperability of collaborative document authoring tools) reference architecture and environment. Using InterDOC, a group of authors can write a document in their favorite environment and can then make this document available via InterDOC to another group of authors using another environment, or even a single user application. We use OMG MDA in order to obtain platform-independent reference architecture.