CoAutoCAD:
converting single-user AutoCAD into a real-time collaborative CAD tool
The goal
of our research is to develop innovative technologies that can be used to
convert existing and new single-user applications into advanced multi-user collaborative
applications. With such technologies, the myriad of single-user applications
could be re-purposed as collaborative systems, thus significantly increasing
the availability and improving the usability of collaborative applications. To
end-users, this would mean that not only would they be able to collaborate,
they would be able to collaborate with the applications with which they are
familiar. To software vendors, this would mean adding new values to existing
single-user products, and creating new multi-user collaborative products for
existing and new customers. To enterprises, this would mean that not only their
capital investment on information systems and tools would be protected, but
also the skills and knowledge of using these tools would be leveraged to
increase the competitiveness of the business.
This
project builds on and extends the Transparent
Adaptation (TA) technology from prior CoWord and CoPowerPoint
projects (http:///cooffice.ntu.edu.sg).
We focus on researching advanced collaboration technologies for support
multiple users to jointly design shared digital media over the Internet, and on
converting a mainstream Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tool - Autodesk AutoCAD - into a real-time collaborative CAD
tool, named CoAutoCAD. The
TA-based CoAutoCAD architecture consists of three
components, as
shown below:
1.
Single-user
Application (SA) provides conventional single-user AutoCAD functionalities and
interface features, but has no knowledge about
multi-user collaboration.
2.
Collaboration
Adaptor (CA), which bridges the
single-user application with the underlying GCE (see below). The CA component
uses the SA API (Application Programming Interface) to augment the SA with
collaboration capabilities without accessing the source code of the SA.
3.
Generic
Collaboration Engine (GCE), which
provides application-independent collaboration capabilities in consistency
maintenance, concurrency control, group awareness, interaction control, etc.
The GCE component can be shared by a wide range of TA-based
collaborative applications.
Based on this TA architecture and a reusable GCE
component, the task of converting a new single-user application is reduced into
the task of researching, designing and implementing a new CA for this new
application. For more detailed information on TA and GCE, please read the following article:
Chengzheng Sun, Steven Xia, David Sun, David Chen.
Haifeng Shen, Wentong Cai: "Transparent
adaptation of single-user applications for multi-user real-time collaboration," ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 13, No.4, December
2006, pp.531-582. In ACM Digital Library.
(please contact us if you cannot access this
article from the ACM digital library).
This project is partially funded by
SERC Grant (P0520094).
Project
leader:
Professor Sun Chengzheng
Nanyang
Technological University
Email: czsun@ntu.edu.sg
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/czsun
Project members:
Assistant Professor Shen Haifeng (SCE, NTU)
Dr
Steven Qian Xia (SCE, NTU)
Project Officer:
Ms Agustina
Nanyang
Technological University
PhD student:
Mr ZHENG Yang
Nanyang
Technological University