Semantic Consistency for Collaborative Systems

In real-time collaborative groupware, shared objects are replicated on distant geographical sites. Each user works on his own copies. This implies the divergence of different copies. Operational transformation approach makes it possible to reconcile the divergent copies. It allows to ensure the syntactic consistency of the copies by ensuring: convergence, causality and user intention. Although these properties resolves the problems involved in the conflicting accesses on the copies, they do not ensure the semantic consistency of the copies with respect to the context of the application. To solve this problem we propose to integrate semantic constraints to the operational transformation approach. This article represents the constraints integration.