ScenariWiki

Abstract

Three-way merging is a technique that may be employed for reintegrating changes to a document in cases where multiple independently modified copies have been made. While tools for three-way merge of ASCII text files exist in the form of the ubiquitous diff and patch tools, these are of limited applicability to XML documents.

We present a method for three-way merging of XML which is targeted at merging XML formats that model human-authored documents as ordered trees (e.g. rich text formats, structured text, drawings, etc.). To this end, we investigate a number of use cases on XML merging (collaborative editing, propagating changes across document variants), from which we derive a set of high-level merge rules. Our merge is based on these rules.

We propose that our merge is easy to both understand and implement, yet sufficiently expressive to handle several important cases of merging on document structure that are beyond the capabilities of traditional text-based tools. In order to justify these claims, we applied our merging method to the merging tasks contained in the use cases. The overall performance of the merge was found to be satisfactory.

The key contributions of this work are: a set of merge rules derived from use cases on XML merging, a compact and versatile XML merge in accordance with these rules, and a classification of conflicts in the context of that merge.

Note: Copyright ACM 2004. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the 2004 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering.

• http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1030397.1030399

• http://www.cs.hut.fi/~ctl/3dm/thesis.pdf

Document formats based on XML are widely used in today's office collaboration. However, most supporting tools like version control systems, or business process systems do not handle these documents adequately. Parallel editing of documents across network and system borders is almost impossible.

Our recent research showed that versions of XML documents can be merged in a reliable way using deltas with context fingerprints. In this paper, we present a collaboration strategy based on these deltas that allows for a highly dynamic distributed collaboration among XML documents.

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.

Multimedia Tools and Applications Volume 43, Number 3, 253-274, DOI: 10.1007/s11042-009-0271-2

wVIEW is an automated system for generating Web applications that relies extensively on document representations and transformations. wVIEW adopts the widely accepted hypermedia design principle that content navigation and presentation are separate concerns. Each of these aspects of the design process is controlled by separate declarative specifications. Only the first specification the content structure specification which is described using UML must be provided. However the wVIEW user is free to add extensions and customizations to both the data and navigation models in order to make the final application suit specific needs. This paper describes the wVIEW approach and the current prototype which focuses on the data and navigation modelling aspects. The paper discusses experiences in using XSLT as the primary development tool and shows examples how the enhancements planned to XSLT address some limitations of the application generation process.