Consistency management for distributed collaboration
Jonathan Rees, Sarah Ferguson, Sankar Virdhagriswaran · ACM Computing Surveys · 1999
Collaborative enterprises, such as the development of complex software systems or web sites, are vulnerable to accidental conflicts between participants ’ activities. They face the twin threats of information loss, where one person accidentally erases or overwrites another’s work, and inconsistency, where one person alters the context of another’s work so as to make that work invalid. The primary purpose of collaboration support tools should be to enable participants in a collaboration to proceed with confidence, knowing that their work is safe from direct and indirect threats, and that they are not accidentally compromising the work of the other participants. The general problem of concurrency control and consistency management in such collaborative projects is addressed by configuration management (CM) systems, which have been the subject of two decades of academic research and industry experience [Feiler 91]. Most CM systems assume central or tightly coupled object repositories, a high degree of trust between participants, and/or implicitly understood consistency criteria. These conditions that fail to apply in many situations in which distributed collaboration is called for. We believe that a new kind of CM system needs to emerge if the full potential of the Internet to facilitate collaborative work is to be realized. Many kinds of collaboration, such as The work reported here was supported in part by DARPA under contracts N6001-96-C-8512 and DAAH01-96-C-R190. Permission to make digital/hard copy of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the