Co-authoring with structured annotations

ABSTRACT

Most co-authoring tools support basic annotations, such as edits and comments that are anchored at specific locations in the document. However, they do not support meta-commentary about a document (such as an author's summary of modifications) which gets separated from the document, often in the body of email messages. This causes unnecessary overhead in the write-review-edit workflow inherent in co-authoring. We present document-embedded structured annotations called "bundles" that incorporate the meta-commentary into a unified annotation model that meets a set of annotation requirements we identified through a small field investigation. A usability study with 20 subjects evaluated the annotation reviewing stage of co-authoring and showed that annotation bundles in our high-fidelity prototype reduced reviewing time and increased accuracy, compared to a system that only supports edits and comments.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

Keywords:
collaborative authoring, collaborative writing, structured annotation, usability study, workflow