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Interoperable Document Collaboration

Published: 16 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

To provide office applications with an easy interoperable document merge capability and to enable the usage of document revision across applications, it is necessary to not only standardize the representations of a document state, but also of the changes made to the document during the editing process. Tracking the changes during editing retains the information usually being recovered afterwards. This avoids costly and time consuming processes like document comparison and diff heuristics [1].
To this day, file formats such as the OpenDocument file format (ODF) do only specify all possible document variations of a document representing the final state of user data. Interoperability is therefore only given on a document level: One ODF application saves a document and a different application is able to load and continue work on the same document state. Common scenarios of document exchange have been by floppy disc, attached to email and exchange across networks via file services such as Dropbox.
Nowadays, the Internet is ubiquitous and multiple users want to work simultaneously on the same document. In that context the transfer of a whole document from user to user is inefficient. Additionally, finding and merging changes in XML-based documents appears to be complex and possibly error-prone [2].
For this reason, the OASIS Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee has started to simplify collaboration by specifying the changes applicable to an ODF document and raising ODF application interoperability from a full document level to a more granular document change level.
In this paper, we present an approach to ODF change representation called "Merge enabled Change-Tracking" (MCT), which is based on the Operational Transformation approach [3].

References

[1]
H. Dohrn and D. Riehle. Fine-grained Change Detection in Structured Text Documents. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM symposium on Document engineering, pages 87–96, 2014.
[2]
S. Rönnau, G. Philipp, U. Borghoff. Efficient change control of XML documents. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM symposium on Document engineering, pages 3–12, 2009.
[3]
Ellis, C. A. and Gibbs, S. J. (1989). Concurrency control in groupware systems. SIGMOD Records, 18(2): 399–407.

Cited By

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  • (2019)The Next Millennium Document FormatProceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 201910.1145/3342558.3345419(1-4)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Collaborative Practices with Structured DataProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300330(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • (2015)A Definition of "Version" for Text Production Data and Natural Language Document DraftsProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: modeling, detection, storage and visualization10.1145/2881631.2881638(27-32)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2015

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cover image ACM Other conferences
DChanges '14: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: modeling, detection, storage and visualization
September 2014
38 pages
ISBN:9781450329644
DOI:10.1145/2723147
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 September 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Document Changes
  2. Merge
  3. Operational Transformation
  4. Real-time collaboration
  5. Versioning
  6. XML

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  • Refereed limited

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DChanges '14

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DChanges '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 9 submissions, 78%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 13 of 19 submissions, 68%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)The Next Millennium Document FormatProceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 201910.1145/3342558.3345419(1-4)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Collaborative Practices with Structured DataProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300330(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • (2015)A Definition of "Version" for Text Production Data and Natural Language Document DraftsProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on (Document) Changes: modeling, detection, storage and visualization10.1145/2881631.2881638(27-32)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2015

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