Synchronizer Based on Operational Transformation for P2P Environments by Michelle Cart and Jean Ferrié
Abstract:
Reconciling divergent copies is a common problem encountered in distributed or mobile systems, asynchronous collaborative groupware, concurrent engineering, software configuration management, version control systems and personal work involving several mobile computing devices. Synchronizers provide a solution by enabling two divergent copies of the same object to be reconciled. Unfortunately, a master copy is generally required before they can be used for reconciling n copies, otherwise copy convergence will not be achieved. This paper presents the principles and algorithm of a Synchronizer which provides the means to reconcile n copies, without discriminating in favour of any particular copy. Copies can be modified (concurrently or not) on different sites and the Synchronizer we propose enables them to be reconciled pairwise, at any time, regardless of the pair, while achieving convergence of all copies. For this purpose, it uses the history of operations executed on each copy and Operational Transformations. It does not require a centralised or ordering (timestamp, state vector, etc.) mechanism. Its main advantage is thus to enable free and lazy propagation of copy updates while ensuring their convergence – it is particularly suitable for P2P environments in which no copy should be favoured.
Not the oldest work on operational transformations, 2007, nor the most recent.
Certainly of interest for distributed topic maps as well as other change tracking applications.
I first saw this in a tweet by onepaperperday.