research-article

Specification and Complexity of Collaborative Text Editing

Authors:

Sebastian Burckhardt,

Alexey Gotsman,

Hongseok Yang, and

Marek ZawirskiAuthors Info & Claims

PODC '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 2016

Pages 259 - 268

https://doi.org/10.1145/2933057.2933090

Published: 25 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Collaborative text editing systems allow users to concurrently edit a shared document, inserting and deleting elements (e.g., characters or lines). There are a number of protocols for collaborative text editing, but so far there has been no precise specification of their desired behavior, and several of these protocols have been shown not to satisfy even basic expectations. This paper provides a precise specification of a replicated list object, which models the core functionality of replicated systems for collaborative text editing. We define a strong list specification, which we prove is implemented by an existing protocol, as well as a weak list specification, which admits additional protocol behaviors.

A major factor determining the efficiency and practical feasibility of a collaborative text editing protocol is the space overhead of the metadata that the protocol must maintain to ensure correctness. We show that for a large class of list protocols, implementing either the strong or the weak list specification requires a metadata overhead that is at least linear in the number of elements deleted from the list. The class of protocols to which this lower bound applies includes all list protocols that we are aware of, and we show that one of these protocols almost matches the bound.

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Cited By

Weidner MPradeep RGeordie BMiller HGonzalez Boix ESutra P(2023)For-Each Operations in Collaborative AppsProceedings of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3578358.3591323(56-62)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578358.3591323
Sandal SOvatman T(2023)Enhancing Ropes for Collaborative Text Editing2023 Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE)10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00415(2593-2599)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00415
Qin BPeng PZhang JWang HMa K(2023)A framework and prototype system in support of workflow collaboration and knowledge mining for manufacturing value chainsIET Collaborative Intelligent Manufacturing10.1049/cim2.120735:1Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1049/cim2.12073
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Index Terms

Specification and Complexity of Collaborative Text Editing

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cover image ACM Conferences

PODC '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 2016

508 pages

ISBN:9781450339643

DOI:10.1145/2933057

General Chair:
George Giakkoupis
INRIA, France

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 25 July 2016

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Funding Sources

Yad Hanadiv Foundation
Israel Science Foundation
Seventh Framework Programme
Ministry of Science ICT and Future Planning

Conference

PODC '16

Sponsor:

PODC '16: ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

July 25 - 28, 2016

Illinois, Chicago, USA

Acceptance Rates

PODC '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 149 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 740 of 2,477 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Weidner MPradeep RGeordie BMiller HGonzalez Boix ESutra P(2023)For-Each Operations in Collaborative AppsProceedings of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3578358.3591323(56-62)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578358.3591323
Sandal SOvatman T(2023)Enhancing Ropes for Collaborative Text Editing2023 Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE)10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00415(2593-2599)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCE60160.2023.00415
Qin BPeng PZhang JWang HMa K(2023)A framework and prototype system in support of workflow collaboration and knowledge mining for manufacturing value chainsIET Collaborative Intelligent Manufacturing10.1049/cim2.120735:1Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1049/cim2.12073
Kokociński MKobus TWojciechowski P(2023)On the correctness of highly available systems in the presence of failuresJournal of Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1016/j.jpdc.2023.04.008180(104707)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2023.04.008
Soundarapandian VKamath ANagar KSivaramakrishnan KJhala RDillig I(2022)Certified mergeable replicated data typesProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523735(332-347)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519939.3523735
Saquib NKrintz CWolski RSzekeres ASivaramakrishnan K(2022)Ordering operations for generic replicated data types using version treesProceedings of the 9th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3517209.3524038(39-46)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2022
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Miller MFürst DHauptmann HKeim DEl‐Assady M(2022)Augmenting Digital Sheet Music through Visual AnalyticsComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1443641:1(301-316)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14436
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Qin BZhang JMa KPeng PWang H(2022)Knowledge Mining Based Collaborative Framework for Manufacturing Value Chains2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD)10.1109/CSCWD54268.2022.9776159(847-854)Online publication date: 4-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCWD54268.2022.9776159
Yamaguchi KMatsuda YMorinaga Y(2022)Averaging Solution of Differential Equations as Value for Argumentation Graph with SimilarityProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2022.09.116207:C(614-623)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
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