Operational transformation: Research and application

Operational transformation (OT) is a collaborative computing technology for supporting advanced collaborative applications. OT was originally invented for consistency maintenance and concurrency control in collaborative editing of plain text documents in 80s. Two decades of research has extended OT functionalities and applications to include group undo, conflict resolution, operation notification and compression, group-awareness, HTML/XML document editing, collaborative office productivity tools, and collaborative computer-aided digital media design tools. Because of its lock-free, unconstrained interaction control, and consistency-preserving properties, OT is particularly suitable for supporting real-time collaboration over the Internet. OT has recently been adopted as the core collaboration technique in Google Wave, which is taking OT to a new range of web-based applications and services, including e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wiki, and social networking. The speaker has been working on OT research and application since 1994. In this talk, the speaker will share his experiences and lessons in researching OT issues, designing OT algorithms, and building OT-based collaborative applications, from 1-dimensional text editors (e.g. CoVim), 2-dimensional word processors (e.g. CoWord), to 3-dimensional computer-aided digital media design tools (e.g. CoMaya).