Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The conceptual framework of a new system, Collaborative Refinery, is motivated by a scenario involving the creation of an FAQ. The scenario introduces the concepts of collecting, culling, organizing and distilling. Distilling is a specialized form of collaborative authoring with support for content selection and genre. The Web-based user interface supporting access to the four conceptual functions is presened in detail. As well, the system architecture and a current implementation are described in detail. Several research directions are discussed with respect to Collaborative Refinery. Collaborative Refinery is related to prior research in personal information management, collaborative authoring, and shared workspaces.