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A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editors

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Abstract

Multi-user collaborative editors are useful computer-aided tools to support human-to-human collaboration. For multi-user collaborative editors, selective undo is an essential utility enabling users to undo any editing operations at any time. Collaborative editors usually adopt operational transformation (OT) to address concurrency and consistency issues. However, it is still a great challenge to design an efficient and correct OT algorithm capable of handling both normal do operations and user-initiated undo operations because these two kinds of operations can interfere with each other in various forms. In this paper, we propose a semi-transparent selective undo algorithm that handles both do and undo in a unified framework, which separates the processing part of do operations from the processing part of undo operations. Formal proofs are provided to prove the proposed algorithm under the well-established criteria. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation are conducted to show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the prior OT-based selective undo algorithms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0503004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62072348), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M662709), and Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (2016FC0106305 and 2019CFB627).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Weiwei Cai & Fazhi He

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Xiao Lv

  3. School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Yuan Cheng

Authors
  1. Weiwei Cai
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  2. Fazhi He
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  3. Xiao Lv
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  4. Yuan Cheng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fazhi He.

Additional information

Weiwei Cai is currently a PhD candidate at School of Computer Science of Wuhan University, China. His research interests include computer supported collaborative work and distributed computing systems.

Fazhi He is currently a professor at School of Computer Science of Wuhan University, China. His research interests include collaborative computing, computer graphics, computer vision, highperformance computing.

Xiao Lv is currently a lecturer at Department of Computer Engineering of Naval University of Engineering, China. Her research interests include computer supported collaborative work, collaborative design.

Yuan Cheng is currently a lecturer at School of Information Management of Wuhan University, China. Her research interests include computer supported collaborative work, scientific visualization, computation geometry.

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Cai, W., He, F., Lv, X. et al. A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editors. Front. Comput. Sci. 15, 155209 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-9518-x

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