Intensional Collaborative Web Environments

This book addresses the general problem ofdeveloping reliable Web applications that offerboth flexible user interfaces and shared browsingcapabilities and, specifically, the ability forusers to create and co-browse geographical,multilingual maps.We offer an innovative solution, in the samesetting, for combining a fully adaptable Webmapping interface and collaborative facilities,in a server developed for this project and describedin this book. The server integrates a mapping tool,a database for multilingual labels, a typesetter andan adaptable GUI, linked together using amultidimensional "shared context", which facilitatesthe addition of new functionality by slightlymodifying the context and with little or no changeto the components already present.The results from this work are of special interestto human-interaction experts, including map makersand web communities specialists, as it shows howto create interfaces with a very large number ofparameters (the context), expandable on-demand.In addition, users can share parts of their contextamong themselves to establish communities incyberspace.... Mehr