The OASIS Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee is working on an update of OpenDocument change-tracking (CT). The update will not only enhance the existing CT feature set to the current state of the art, e.g. tracking style changes, but also lay the foundation for the standardization of real-time collaboration (RTC) by making CT compatible to RTC.
The new design in a nutshell Pattern of trackable changes of OpenDocument will be derived from common user actions and defined as "operations". The overall design of ODF change-tracking will change from a before/after XML design to a sequence of serialized operations, improving the merge ability using Operational Transformation. To split overall complexity the overall set of valid documents defined by the RelaxNG schema will be split into smaller XML components based on semantic entities known by the user, e.g. table, image, paragraph and character. A complete XML document tree is mappable to a component tree and operations are always referring to a component they are altering, choosing one of the 6 meta operation types: add, remove, split, merge, move and replace. The theory part - new design in a nutshell Pattern of trackable changes of OpenDocument will be derived from common user actions and defined as "operations". The overall design of ODF change-tracking will change from a before/after XML design to a sequence of serialized operations, improving the merge ability using Operational Transformation. To split overall complexity the overall set of valid documents defined by the RelaxNG schema will be split into smaller XML components based on semantic entities known by the user, e.g. table, image, paragraph and character. A complete XML document tree is mappable to a component tree and operations are always referring to a component they are altering, choosing one of the 6 meta operation types: add, remove, split, merge, move and replace.
Speakers: Svante Schubert