Article

A three-way merge for XML documents

Author:

Tancred LindholmAuthors Info & Claims

DocEng '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Document engineering

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/1030397.1030399

Published: 28 October 2004 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Adams MGriffis EPorter TSatish SZhao EOmar C(2025)Grove: A Bidirectionally Typed Collaborative Structure Editor CalculusProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/37049099:POPL(2176-2204)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3704909
Schesch BFeatherman RYang KRoberts BErnst MFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Evaluation of Version Control Merge ToolsProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695075(831-83)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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https://doi.org/10.1142/S2972370124300024
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A three-way merge for XML documents

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cover image ACM Conferences

DocEng '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Document engineering

October 2004

252 pages

ISBN:1581139381

DOI:10.1145/1030397

General Chair:
Ethan V. Munson
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
,
Program Chair:
Jean-Yves Vion-Dury

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 28 October 2004

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DocEng04: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

October 28 - 30, 2004

Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 194 of 564 submissions, 34%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3704909
Schesch BFeatherman RYang KRoberts BErnst MFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)Evaluation of Version Control Merge ToolsProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695075(831-83)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695075
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https://doi.org/10.1142/S2972370124300024
Yoshida RSasaki YXiao CIshihara YAsano YOnizuka M(2024)Transaction Management in Collaborative Data ManagementBidirectional Collaborative Data Management10.1007/978-981-97-6429-7_5(93-119)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2024
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Bakaoukas NBakaoukas A(2021)A Novel Three-Way Merge Algorithm for HTML/XML Documents Using a Hidden Markov ModelIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-030-80119-9_3(75-101)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2021
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