Title: Reconciliation of compound actions in internet-based distributed collaborative systems

Authors: Haifeng Shen, Suiping Zhou

Addresses: School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798 Singapore. ' School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, 639798 Singapore

Abstract: In collaborative editing systems, consistency maintenance of compound actions presents a challenge due to the semantic loss in representing compound actions by primitive operations. In this paper, we contribute a three-layer architecture to bridge the semantic gap between editing actions generated from the editor user interface and editing operations that are used to represent actions, where compound rather than primitive operations are used as the logical form of compound actions. This approach can preserve the intentions of editing actions generated in different editors even in the presence of syntactic conflicts, while retaining the compatibility with existing single-user editors.

Keywords: user interfaces; distributed systems; collaborative editing; consistency maintenance; conflict; compound actions; operational transformation; collaboration; semantic loss; internet.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2008.025550

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2008 Vol.5 No.5/6, pp.309 - 322

Published online: 22 May 2009 *

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