Timeliner: Supporting Collaborative Scientific Writing

This paper describes design, concepts, and initial implementation considerations of a timeline-based mash-up service, which addresses the needs of researchers involved in collaborative writing. The process of collaborative writing was dramatically changed with appearance of new Web 2.0 tools and services. Being limited in time, researchers need tools for collaborative writing that can support their existing workflow in a non-destructive manner. We start from short overview of existing studies on collaborative writing and then describe three design iterations including activity-centered design, user-centered design, and system-design. As a result of these design iterations, we introduce a concept of Timeliner -- Web-based tool for supporting the process of collaborative writing.