On Coordinating Collaborative Objects

A collaborative object represents a data type (such as a text document) designed to be shared by a group of dispersed users. The Operational Transformation (OT) is a coordination approach used for supporting optimistic replication for these objects. It allows the users to concurrently update the shared data and exchange their updates in any order since the convergence of all replicas, i.e. the fact that all users view the same data, is ensured in all cases. However, designing algorithms for achieving convergence with the OT approach is a critical and challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a formal compositional method for specifying complex collaborative objects. The most important feature of our method is that designing an OT algorithm for the composed collaborative object can be done by reusing the OT algorithms of component collaborative objects. By using our method, we can start from correct small collaborative objects which are relatively easy to handle and incrementally combine them to build more complex collaborative objects.