The CCI model The CCI model was proposed as a general framework for consistency management in collaborative editing

systems.[3][6] Under the CCI model, three consistency properties are grouped together: Causality Preservation : the same as the precedence property in the CC Model. Convergence: the same as the convergence property in the CC Model. Intention Preservation: ensures that the effect of executing an operation on any document state be the same as the intention of the operation. The intention of an operation O is defined as the execution effect which can be achieved by applying O on the document state from which O was generated.

Preserving Operation Effects Relation in Group Editors

Consistency maintenance is a critical and challenging issue in many interactive groupware applications that can be modeled as group editors. This paper addresses

two open consistency problems:

divergence and operation effects relation violation.

While the former has been partly solved,

the latter has never been addressed in any published work. Particularly it preserves the effects relation of concurrent operations so that convergence is achieved automatically.

Our work provides a new perspective into group editors and operational transformation algorithms.

OT has been found uniquely promising in achieving

convergence, causality and intention preservation without sacrificing responsiveness and concurrent work.

The main property of OT, allowing users to edit any part of the shared data at any time, of developing collaborative systems as a customizable collaboration medium

Causality preservation: all operations are executed in their cause-eect order. To verify, for any two operationsO1and O2, if O1! O2, then O is executed before O21at all sites

(1)

Causality preservation based on the happen-before relation *11+ may be too restrictive to

some applications. It is well-known that the happen-before relation may not capture the real causal relationship among events in distributed systems. Operations with happen-before relations may not have any real causal- or data-dependency relation, so causality-preserving execution order may not be strictly necessary for them. (1) Convergence may not be required by collaborative editing systems in which an identical final

result is not essential. For example, in collaborative bitmap drawing tools, concurrent overlapping drawings may result in divergent results in overlapping pixels, but such divergence is tolerable, and convergence at the fine-grained pixel level is not essential for draft drawing applications. For another example, in text-based chatting applications (a special kind of collaborative text editing tool), concurrent chatting statements may be inserted on chatting UIs in different orders at different sites, resulting in non-identical chatting logs, but such divergence does not cause any problem to users since chatting statements are properly tagged (e.g. with user names and times). (2) The notion of intention preservation captures only part of a general requirement on operation

effects in collaborative editing environments, but leaves unspecified details of operation effects in specific applications. Therefore, intention preservation can be broadly interpreted and specialized in a variety of ways in concrete applications. In fact, intention preservation has been specialized in different ways in group text editors [43] and graphics editors [47], respectively. Also, weaker forms of intention preservation (e.g. preserving part of the original operation effect in the face of conflict) are also acceptable in some collaborative editing applications [3].