VERSION COMPOSITION AND IDENTIFICATION IN INTERNET-BASED REAL-TIME COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

Although multi-version approach has been widely discussed and implemented in database systems, version control systems, and asynchronous groupware systems, its potentials in synchronous groupware systems are largely unexplored. Intention preservation is an important aspect of consistency maintenance in synchronous collaborative editors. The multi-version approach can preserve individual users' concurrent conflicting intentions in a consistent way. This paper first examines the problems of the approach in existing collaborative graphic editing systems. Later it presents a general version composition scheme that is independent of the intentional relationships defined as long as they are a compatibility relation. Finally a special version composition and identification scheme is proposed with conflict defined at object level.