Keeping Free-edited Textual and Graphical Views of Information Consistent

Multi-view editing is useful in many situations where users of a software application want to see and interact with different representations of the same information. This paper describes a new approach to keeping free-edited multiple textual and graphical views of information consistent. Descriptions of changes to information items are displayed in various ways in the multiple views of these items. Users can request an editing tool to automatically apply changes to a view, select a change to make from a range of possible changes, or manually implement changes to maintain view consistency. Semantic errors, user-defined changes and hierarchical changes can be represented, and this technique also supports flexible view consistency for cooperative work systems. Experience with this technique in several diverse multi-view editing environments is described.