A multi-version algorithm for cooperative edition of hierarchically-structured documents

Several approaches do exist to solve the problem of editing a text document cooperatively in real time. We believe that those approaches could be improved in two ways: (1) preserving the intention of the participants in a better manner and (2) benefiting from a hierarchical document structure (as in XML). This article presents an algorithm for cooperative edition of documents that (1) achieves intention preservation by keeping different versions of the concurrently accessed document fragments and that (2) reduces concurrency conflicts by restricting them to hierarchically dependent fragments.