Flexible Merging for Asynchronous Collaborative Systems

Version control systems are widely used asynchronous collaborative systems in team-working environments, where document merging is a key function. However most existing systems only support limited semantic merging, and techniques for supporting semantic merging are strictly bound up with the merging algorithms that do syntactic merging. In this paper, we propose a flexible merging framework in which semantic merging policies are separated from the syntactic merging mechanism for asynchronous collaborative systems. In this framework, semantic merging policies are not restricted by the merging algorithms used in the syntactic merging mechanism, and the syntactic merging mechanism is flexible to support a wide range of semantic merging policies. This framework can be used to describe and compare a range of existing merging policies and mechanisms, and to guide the design of new merging policies and mechanisms. The proposed framework has been applied to the design of a flexible merging component in FORCE (Flexible Operation-based Revision Control Environment) prototype, which uses a single syntactic merging mechanism to support a range of semantic merging policies.