The CASCADE project resides in the Department of Information Science and Telecommunications at the University of Pittsburgh. The project is headed by Michael Spring. Begun in 1993, the project has evolved from a demonstration of information management with graphical interfaces to a system for collaborative authoring of structured documents over wide area networks using a three tier client server architecture. It is our contention that a tool like CASCADE can greatly reduce the time and cost to develop group authored documents. National and international standards, are prototypical examples of collaboratively authored documents. They are costly and take many years to complete. Funding for the project by NIST was based on the assumption that standards groups, particularly in the IT arena need reduce the time and cost of standards development.
We believe that CASCADE can be used in a variety of settings where documents are the central focus of the collaboration. It has been tested in conference and classroom settings. It has been and is currently being tested in the standards development process. Some of the preliminary findings from usability studies have been set out in Preliminary Usability Studies.
The overall design goals of the CASCADE project are set out in A Network Based Collaborative Authoriong System. A preliminary draft of our thinking about the protocol needed to support collaborative authoring as well some discussion of the planned agent interface has been posted for review and comment as Development of a Network Based Collaborative Authoring System.
The development of the client server version of CASCADE has been supported by Dr. Shukri Wakid of the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As a part of the contract with NIST, we surveyed the available software that might be used to support collaboration. The report is entitled Software to Support Collaboration: Focus on Collaborative Authoring
Since 1993, the project has grown and involved dozens of graduate students. The number of graduate students involved in the project has varied from 3 or 4 to more than a dozen. In the fall of 1994, the project which up until that point had been called a "faculty viewer" or fv, was reconceptualized as CASCADE, "Computer Augmented Support for Collaborative Authoring and Document Editing". This occurred as a result of two events. The first was the offering of a doctoral seminar on augmentation by Spring. The students in this seminar were challenged to ask how the work of Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s might be recast in the context of what we can do today. The second event that influenced the design was a series of conversations between Spring and three colleagues involved in the management of the US and international standards efforts in the information technology arena -- Carl Cargill of Netscape, Steve Oksala of Unisys, and Don Loughry of Hewlett-Packard. As a result of these conversations, IT standards were selected as prototypical examples of collaboratively authored documents. The goals of the effort were defined as follows:
The initial CASCADE prototype was developed in C using X Windows. It has a sophisticated set of functions and features designed to allow the researcher to gather data about usage and activity. It also supports a framework for communication agents which can be dropped into the CASCADE process. However, because of the costly nature of serving X11 protocols over a wide area network, work on this version was suspended in favor of a more network-efficient client server version. Researchers who wish to conduct experiments and collect detailed activity logs for analysis may still find this version preferable. Two documents describe the early X Windows prototype:
