Operational transformation

Operational transformation (OT) is a technology for supporting a range of collaboration functionalities in advanced collaborative software systems. OT was originally invented for consistency maintenance and concurrency control in collaborative editing of plain text documents. Two decades of research has extended its capabilities and expanded its applications to include group undo, locking, conflict resolution, operation notification and compression, group-awareness, HTML/XML and tree-structured document editing, collaborative office productivity tools, application-sharing, and collaborative computer-aided media design tools (see OTFAQ). In 2009 OT was adopted as a core technique behind the collaboration features in Apache Wave and Google Docs.

Operational Transformation was pioneered by C. Ellis and S. Gibbs in the GROVE (GRoup Outline Viewing Edit) system in 1989. Several years later, some correctness issues were identified and several approaches were independently proposed to solve these issues, which was followed by another decade of continuous efforts of extending and improving OT by a community of dedicated researchers. In 1998, a Special Interest Group on Collaborative Editing (SIGCE) was set up to promote communication and collaboration among CE and OT researchers. Since then, SIGCE holds annual CE workshops in conjunction with major CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) conferences, such as ACM CSCW, GROUP and ECSCW.

Collaborative systems using OT typically adopt a replicated architecture for the storage of shared documents to ensure good responsiveness in high latency environments, such as the Internet. The shared documents are replicated at the local storage of each collaborating site, so editing operations can be performed at local sites immediately and then propagated to remote sites. Remote editing operations arriving at a local site are typically transformed and then executed. The transformation ensures that application-dependent consistency criteria are achieved across all sites. The lock-free, nonblocking property of OT makes the local response time not sensitive to networking latencies. As a result, OT is particularly suitable for implementing collaboration features such as group editing in the Web/Internet context.

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