The Research And Design Of A Cooperative Editing Algorithm

The real-time cooperative editing systems is an important application in the field of CSCW. It has three characteristics: real-time, distributed and unconstrained. Consistency maintenance is one of the most significant challenges in designing and implementing real-time cooperative editing systems. Such traditional approaches as turn-taking, locking, serialization and causal ordering, can not achieve consistency maintenance. Various algorithms attempt to achieve consistency maintenance in recent ten years. In this paper, firstly, we review some cooperative editing algorithms in terms of achieving consistency maintenance. Thereafter we propose GOT2 algorithm to achieve consistency maintenance and ensure the context-specific consistency, which relies on a linear representation of the document. Also we put forward a variety version, treeGOT2, which relies on a tree representation of the document. We validate the correctness of these algorithms by a prototype system at the last part of this paper.