An extended transaction model for cooperative authoring of XML data

Abstract

In many application scenarios, for example in design or media production processes, several authors have to work cooperatively on the same project and consequently on the same data. In this context, a frequently used data format is XML. To enable cooperative authoring of shared XML graph structures, several requirements have to be fulfilled, e.g., early visibility of updates, multi-directional information flow, and processing data in parallel. Most transaction models proposed in the literature are hardly applicable in this context. In this paper, we propose a novel transaction model based on multi-level transactions and dynamic actions that meets these requirements. We describe the transaction model as well as its formal properties and discuss issues such as synchronization and logging.