A group-based time-stamping scheme for the preservation of group intentions

Real-time negotiation support is an important issue in collaborative editing systems. The existing multi-versioning techniques provide support for negotiation by preserving individual users' concurrent conflicting intentions in multiple versions. They are "intrusive" in the sense that the created versions are embedded into the document under editing. This paper proposes a real-time annotative negotiation approach, where the document is annotated rather than embedded with various versions of the objects in conflict. It focuses on the way in which a group consensus or intention can be integrated into the document. The major technical issue is the time-stamping of the operations contained in the group intentions. A group-based time-stamping scheme is proposed to time-stamp them such that individual intentions and group intentions can be treated in a consistent manner.