Flexible conflict detection and management in collaborative applications

This paper presents a comprehensive model for dealing with semantic conflicts in applications, and the implementation of this model in a toolkit for collaborative systems. Conflicts are defined purely through application semantics—the set of behaviors supported by the applications—and yet can be detected and managed by the infrastructure with minimal application code. This work describes a number of novel techniques for managing conflicts, both in the area of resolution policies and user interfaces for presenting standing conflicts in application data.