Operational transformation for collaborative word processing

  • Authors:
  • David Sun;Steven Xia;Chengzheng Sun;David Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia;Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia;Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia;Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Operational Transformation (OT) is a technique originally invented for supporting consistency maintenance in collaborative text editors. Word processors have much richer data types and more comprehensive operations than plain text editors. Among others, the capability of updating attributes of any types of object is an essential feature of all word processors. In this paper, we report an extension of OT for supporting a generic Update operation, in addition to Insert and Delete operations, for collaborative word processing. We focus on technical issues and solutions involved in transforming Updates for both consistency maintenance and group undo. A novel technique, called Multi-Version Single-Display (MVSD), has been devised to resolve conflict between concurrent Updates, and integrated into the framework of OT. This work has been motivated by and conducted in the CoWord project, which aims to convert MS Word into a real-time collaborative word processor without changing its source code. This OT extension is relevant not only to word processors but also to a range of interactive applications that can be modelled as editors.