Operational transformation algorithm with conflict detection and awareness methods for real-time collaborative editing in P2P environments

Abstract

With the development of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), groupware systems that support collaborative editing have been developing rapidly. Real-time collaborative editing system is groupware systems that allow groups of users from different sites to view and edit the same documents at the same time. Consistency maintenance is one of the most important challenges in the design of these systems. Many algorithms for consistency maintenance which have good performance with Client/Server mode can't work in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) environments. In this paper, we propose an operational transformation algorithm with conflict detection and awareness methods for real-time collaborative editing in P2P environments, where conflict awareness is a reasonable way to help users to solve conflict problems. We designed and implemented a real-time collaborative editor using our algorithm. The experiment results showed that our algorithm is viable and feasible.