Collaborative Editing with TeNDax

Abstract:

In today's world, doing business without the possibility of creating collaborative business processes, characterized by data storing and communication, is unthinkable. Day to day, ad hoc and long-term business process operations require a certain kind of collaborative workflow management system. Workflow and process management solutions for handling business data (customer, product, finance, etc.), including development, distribution, sale, marketing, support and so on, have been available for a long time.

A significant gap lies between the handling of business data (customer, product, finance, etc.) and text data (documents). Documents are not treated as a product even though a lot of companies' knowledge is stored within this structure. For a large-scale document management environment, local copies of remote data sources are often made. However, it is often difficult to monitor the sources in order to check for changes and to download changed data items to the copies. Very often, text documents are stored somewhere within a confusing file structure with an inscrutable hierarchy and low security. On the other hand, data, which from an organization's point of view can be classed as crucial, are stored in databases. Here, the infrastructure and the data are highly secure, multi-user capable and available to several other tools for compiling reports, content and knowledge. Collaborative business processes can be defined and applied to such data. Our idea is to make use of such a philosophy for texts. We therefore strive for the storage of texts in a database in a native way, which would enable functions such as editing, awareness, fine-grained security, sophisticated document management, versioning, business processes, text structure, data lineage, metadata mining, and multi-channel publishing, all within a collaborative, real-time and multi-user environment.

We argue for a native extension of DBMS to manage text. This addition must be made 'clean' and the responding sophisticated data type should have the image of a 'first-class citizen' of a DBMS (e.g. integers, character strings, etc.). Based on this structure, collaborative business processes can be applied.

Short bio:

Thomas B. Hodel grew up in the lake of Constance area. He received a bachelor in teaching from the Teacher Training College of Constance (Switzerland), a master in theology, and a master in computer science from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He worked on his Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame, IN, U.S.A., and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, U.S.A. Mr. Hodel earned his Ph.D. in computer science 1998 at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Dr. Thomas HODEL has been the senior research assistant in the database technology research group of Prof. Dr. Klaus Dittrich, University of Zurich since 2002. He worked for several years in the information technology business at Pilkington, UBS and CSC.

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