Merging in a Collaborative Environment

这是一个为期3年的标准奖项。在协作计算中，出于几个原因，出现了将对象的不同版本合并到共同状态的需求，这些原因包括乐观并发控制、非WYSIWIS耦合、缺乏访问控制、后来者和移动计算。当前的系统要么支持受限形式的合并，要么要求程序员完全实现合并过程。这项研究的假设是，可以从这些过程的高级规范中自动生成大量不同的合并过程。该项目将研究建立这一假设必须解决的几个问题，包括任意数量对象的同时合并、用户定义对象的合并、用户界面对象的实时合并、移动环境中的合并、指定合并程序的抽象以及合并与其他协作功能(如并发控制)之间的关系。它使用的是一种实验方法，其中新概念被实施并用于验证性实验。如果成功，它将允许合并成为协作环境中的常见操作，而不需要大量特定于应用程序的编程。

This is a 3-year standard award. The need to merge different versions of an object to a common state arises in collaborative computing for several reasons, including optimistic concurrency control, non-WYSIWIS coupling, absence of access control, latecomers, and mobile computing. Current systems either support restricted forms of merging, or require programmers to completely implement merge procedures. The hypothesis of this research is that it is possible to automatically generate a large variety of merge procedures from high level specifications of these procedures. The project will investigate several issues that must be resolved to establish this hypothesis, including simultaneous merging of an arbitrary number of objects, merging of user-defined objects, realtime merging of user-interface objects, merging in a mobile environment, abstractions for specifying merge procedures, and the relationship between merging and other collaboration functions such as concurrency control. It is uses an experimental method wherein the new concepts are implemented and used in validation experiments. If successful, it will allow merging to become a common operation in a collaborative environment without requiring significant application-specific programming.