Semantic Preservation in Real-time Collaborative Graphics Designing Systems

While most of researches focus on resolving the syntactic consistency problem in real-time collaborative graphics designing system, the semantic preservation problem should not be neglected. Graphics are created with user’s meanings. These meanings should be notified to other users and should not be arbitrarily modified by others. In this paper, we resolve the semantic preservation problem by first classifying it into two categories: static semantic preservation and dynamic semantic preservation. Then a semantic preservation model is proposed. In this model, first we design semantic expressions to express user’s meanings, and then we give the semantic preservation and conflict resolution approaches based on semantic expressions in detail. This model has been tested in the CoDesign system.