Tombstone Transformation Functions for Ensuring Consistency in Collaborative Editing Systems

Abstract

In collaborative editing, consistency maintenance of the copies of shared data is a critical issue. In the last decade, operational transformation (OT) approach revealed as a suitable mechanism for maintaining consistency. Unfortunately, none of the published propositions relying on this approach are able to satisfy the mandatory correctness properties TP1 and TP2 defined in the Ressel's framework. This paper addresses this correctness issue by proposing a new way to model shared state by retaining tombstones when elements are removed. An instantiation of the proposed model for a linear data structure and the related transformation functions are provided