Supporting entailment constraints in the context of collaborative web applications.

Collaborative Web applications allow several users to collaboratively work on the same artifact. In addition to popular use cases, such as collaborative text editing, they can also be used for form-based business applications that often require forms to be filled out by different stakeholders or stakeholder roles. In this context, the different stakeholders often need to fill in different parts of the forms. For example, in an e-health application a nurse might fill in the details and a doctor needs to sign them. Role-based access control and entailment constraints provide means for defining such restrictions. So far entailment constraint have mainly been studied in the context of workflow-based architectures, but not for collaborative Web applications. We present a generic approach for the specification and enforcement of entailment constraints in collaborative Web applications that supports their real-time nature and the non-prescriptive order in which tasks can be performed. Further, we discuss a model-driven implementation approach of our concepts and lessons learned and limitations.