COLLABORATIVE CHEMINFORMATICS APPLICATIONS - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 415

Figure 24.9 Cheminformatics section of chemical blogspace aggregates blog posts
from cheminformaticians, providing a platform for discussion of algorithms and theory
within a larger community than that of a single project.
The technologies discussed so far have focused on communication between
members of a collaboration and other interested parties. But another vital
aspect of collaborative projects is the development of documentation—ranging
from API documentation to tutorials and policy documents. While one could
exchange documents via e-mail, one very quickly runs into the problem of
keeping everybody's editions synchronized. Collaborative document editing
systems have recently been developed that directly address this problem. One
example is Google Docs, which is an online resource that allows one to create
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and then share them between
other users. Each authorized user can edit the document and, more impor-
tantly, multiple users can simultaneously work on these documents. The service
automatically tracks the edits by each user and provides an intuitive view of
the document history, allowing one to view the edits made by each user. The
documents can be exported to a variety of common formats, allowing one to
introduce such documents into the traditional workfl ow.