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Versioning XML-based office documents

An efficient, format-independent, merge-capable approach

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Abstract

The ability to reliably merge independent updates of a document is a crucial prerequisite to efficient collaboration in office work. However, merge support for common office document standards like OpenDocument or OfficeOpenXML is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present a consistent versioning model for XML documents in general including merge support. This is achieved by using context-aware fingerprints that identify edit operations and allow for a conflict detection. We show how to extract tracked changes from office documents and map them on our delta model. Experimental results indicate that our fingerprinting technique is efficient and reliable.

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Notes

  1. In terms of GNU diff, v and v′ would be called a hunk.

  2. At least OpenOffice uses such an internal representation. Since Microsoft Office is closed-source, we can only guess.

  3. During the re-implementation of our merge procedure, we were able to increase the speed by a factor of over 50 compared to the first version presented in [24].

  4. By default, we avoid a neighborhood search if the fingerprint matches completely.

  5. The apparent discrepance to over 700 edit operations in the performance evaluation is derived from the fact that our approach has glued the tracked changes on the ODF-level together to a significant lower amount of edit operations on the delta level.

  6. Within ODF documents, so-called soft-page-breaks can be included that indicate a page break at that position to avoid orphans and widow lines in the document view. An edit operation that tries to change a paragraph containing such a soft-page-break would therefore be reported as a conflict. To avoid this, it is possible to extract all soft-page-breaks before delta application, without breaking the document content (see [4]). We omitted this to not distort our test results.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their students Geraint Philipp and Maik Teupel, who showed exceptional enthusiasm when implementing parts of the tool-set presented in this paper.

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  1. Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany

    Sebastian Rönnau & Uwe M. Borghoff

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  1. Sebastian Rönnau
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Correspondence to Sebastian Rönnau.

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Rönnau, S., Borghoff, U.M. Versioning XML-based office documents. Multimed Tools Appl 43, 253–274 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0271-2

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