Maintaining State Consistency Across Heterogeneous Collaborative Applications
Ivan Marsic, Xiaodong Sun, Carlos Correa, Tongyin Liu · 2002
Abstract—The proliferation of computer devices and wireless networks allows the users to access information and collaborate with others from anywhere, using the device that best matches the current context. Device capabilities constrain the application implementation, which implies that the user interface and the shared information will differ across devices. Some shared information may be omitted or abstracted to fit the device capabilities and, as a result, the application state differs on different devices. Therefore, there arises a problem of consistency management of the application state across different platforms. Application state is determined by the data structures that represent the application’s data and its user interface and we assume that the application state can be represented as a graph data structure. We present a set of conditions on the rules relating the states in different implementations of an application and derive an algorithm which maintains the state consistency under the user interactions. We also illustrate an application scenario that benefits from heterogeneous state representations. Index Terms—Consistency management, heterogeneous computing, graph isomorphism. 1 1