| dc.description.abstract | Collaborative editing systems (or group editors) allow a geographically dispersed
group of human users to view and modify shared multimedia documents, such as
research papers, design diagrams, web pages and source code together over a computer
network. In addition to being useful tools, group editors are a classic research vehicle
and model of interactive groupware applications, based on which a variety of social
and technical issues have been investigated.
Consistency maintenance as a fundamental problem in group editors has attracted
constant research attention. Operational transformation (OT) is an optimistic
consistency maintenance method that supports unconstrained collaboration among
human users. Although significant progress has been achieved over the past decade,
there is still a large space for improvement on the theoretical part of OT. In this dissertation,
we are concerned with three problems: (1) How to evaluate the correctness
of OT-based consistency maintenance protocols; (2) How to design and prove correct
OT-based protocols; (3) What are the consistency correctness conditions for group
editing systems in general.
This dissertation addresses the above three problems and makes the following
contributions: (1) propose a total order based framework including a new consistency model and the associated design methodology. This framework reduces the complexities
of the OT design; (2) improve the total order based framework by introducing a
natural order based framework. In contrast, this framework removes the requirement
of defining a total order that is not necessary to the OT design; (3) establish a generic
consistency model and propose the first set of practical design guidelines in OT based
on this model. | en |
