Today I received an email from my friend and fellow student Alexander Klimetschek. He is developing a system called DocSynch, which allows multiple people to synchronously work on one document. It's implemented via an IRC protocol and theres a working plugin for the opensource java editor jEdit.

While this seems to be completely unrelated to my current XML database project the scientific background of collaborative editing is probably very interesting. Multiple users editing one semi-structured hierarchical document is exactly what a XML database is supposed to provide. I have to check on that ...