Creating e‐books in a distributed and collaborative way

This paper describes how groups of authors may create electronic books about the knowledge area of their interest by means of unsupervised collaborative work. For this task we propose a Web‐based groupware system that allows building Web sites that can be considered as electronic books. In these Web sites we can find in a structured way the relevant knowledge about an area or topic. The system allows the creation of e‐books in the Web, in an asynchronous and distributed way, and without the need of an editor for managing the task. This is possible through a knowledge crystallisation process supported by virtual communities of experts. Currently, there are several active e‐books, which have been created by groups of students at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Examples include the operating systems e‐book and the uncertain reasoning e‐book and these are described.