Revision provenance in text documents of asynchronous collaboration

Many text documents today are collaboratively edited, often with multiple small changes. The problem we consider in this paper is how to find provenance for a specific part of interest in the document. A full revision history, represented as a version tree, can tell us about all updates made to the document, but most of these updates may apply to other parts of the document, and hence not be relevant to answer the provenance question at hand. In this paper, we propose the notion of a revision unit as a flexible unit to capture the necessary provenance. We demonstrate through experiments the capability of the revision units in keeping only relevant updates in the provenance representation and the flexibility of the revision units in adjusting to updates reflected in the version tree.