A General Merging Algorithm Based on Object Marking

It is an ordinary need for cooperative applications to merge different versions of an object to a common state. Though many approaches exist, they are either too complex to implement or not flexible enough to meet the various high-level requirements. To solve the problem, a general merging algorithm is developed based on object marking, i.e., the contents of an object are marked with appropriate labels. The paper details the algorithm and shows how to recover operation context and how to detect and resolve operation conflicts with an example. The algorithm is efficient and flexible enough to allow users to specify various merging policies. Therefore, it can be implemented as a common service for cooperative applications.