Method and apparatus for sharing asymmetric information and services in simultaneously viewed documents on a communication system

Abstract

An arrangement for realizing asymmetric collaboration utilizes a “shared Web-top”, i.e., a work space, in which different in-document applications can run and be shared. Specifically, in one embodiment of the invention employed in asymmetric collaboration, documents to be collaborated on at different users' terminals are logically identical but structurally different. Indeed, one of the collaborators, for example, a customer service agent, may have access to information that should not be made available to others of the collaborators. This asymmetric collaboration is realized by assigning a unique logical name to each information entity. Then, changes in the entity captured by some detection technique, for example, the use of document polling or event handlers, are propagated along with the name of the entity to the collaborators, where they are processed only if the relevant named entity exists. If the entity exists the logical name of the entity is mapped into its physical name which, therefore, allows asymmetric collaboration. Consequently, the name-based technique allows the collaborators, e.g., customer and agent, to share changes in the logically common portions of documents, which are structurally different.