Producing publications is a complex process consisting of many different tasks and involving a variety of specialist contributors. A publication process includes authoring, editing, composition and ends with the distribution of the publication. In the past, the publication process allowed only a limited cooperation between the participants, and only a small number of revision cycles were feasible. Today increasingly sophisticated tools result in a new level of requirements. The publication process must be faster, the quality improved, and new media provide for innovative forms of presentation and distribution. As an answer to these requirements we propose an open, distributed publication environment, used by the different specialist contributors, e.g. authors, editors, layout designers, typesetters, jointly producing and distributing a publication. We distinguish three different kinds of components in such an environment: assistants, agents, and tools. Assistants provide users with a homogeneous access to local tools, such as text editors or information systems. In addition, they support user cooperation. Agents offer direct access to non-local tools, originally available only to the assistants of other users. In order to support transaction properties for the user's applications, we propose a transaction model with the following characteristics: reduced conflict rate between user operations by the use of semantic information for conflict definition, easy integration of existing tools and guaranty of ACID properties by assistants and agents if tools supporting ACID transactions are accessed.

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