Syntax-based reconciliation for asynchronous collaborative writing

Abstract

With the rapid popularity of computer networks, collaborative document writing becomes increasingly desirable in recent years. In practice, collaborative writing is more likely to be done in an asynchronous manner, where collaborators usually work in parallel with different time schedules and are not present at the same time. Merging is the key technique to support concurrent writing and textual merging remains the primary and the only successful merging function to date. However, most of existing systems support constrained textual merging for the simplicity of the underling merging algorithms. In this paper, we propose a flexible operation-based syntactic textual merging algorithm that is capable of reconciling changes made in parallel by different users according to the syntax of the files to be merged or user-specified merging policies. Moreover, this syntax-based reconciliation algorithm is able to preserve the intentions of individual changes