حل تعارضات معناشناختی مبتنی بر هستی شناسی در ویرایش مشترک اسناد طراحی

Semantic conflicts happen frequently during collaborative editing of design documents. The problem of semantic consistency of words and the maintenance of users' editing intentions are the two major challenges when resolving those semantic conflicts. Based on WordNet this paper presents an ontology description language—FLoDL and introduces it to describe the global ontology library (GOL) and the individual ontology library (IOL) in collaborative editing. By this means, we reconstruct the architecture of collaborative editing and propose a mixed peer-to-peer structured semantic collaborative editing architecture. Then a new algorithm for inserting operations, from which semantic conflicts are often caused, is designed to solve the problem of semantic consistency of words. Moreover, by adding users' individualized semantic information into their IOL, we provide the users with individualized services and successfully maintain users' editing intensions. Finally, through some detailed experiments, we perform a compared analysis to show that semantic collaborative editing not only keeps smaller clients (less storage space) but also localizes many editing operations and thereby improves the performance of collaborative editing.

In collaborative design designers often insert, delete and update design documents collaboratively [12]. That is, designers often edit design documents collaboratively through network. There are two types of collaborative editing: synchronous and asynchronous. In this paper, we mainly discuss synchronous case. Concurrence control is essential in synchronous collaborative editing. It consists of the operation consistency control and the semantic consistency control [1] and [5]. Now there are many solutions to concurrence control in collaborative editing, such as locks. There are different types of locks: the pessimistic lock, the semi-optimistic lock, the optimistic lock and etc. The more optimistic the lock is, the more cost the system undo has to spend, which leads to low system efficiency; on the other hand, the more pessimistic the lock is, the weaker the system's response ability is [15]. Therefore, locks fail to meet the strict response requirement in synchronous collaborative editing. Besides locks, serialization, operation transformation [2], Reduce [3] and [4] have also been suggested to solve concurrence control in synchronous collaborative editing. However, all these methods only solve the syntax problems. There are also many semantic problems in synchronous collaborative editing such as semantic consistency of words, which belongs to the semantic conflict problem [5]. If the semantic consistency of words is not maintained, design documents completed by multi-users using collaborative editing will be full of semantic errors. So far, there is little achievement on solving the semantic consistency of words in synchronous collaborative editing except for the user-centered model which is proposed by Xue [6]. In this model, when dealing with the problem of semantic consistency of words in collaborative editing, according to different users' operations, many different document versions are generated. After that users will discuss these versions to get one which is agreed on by most users. This model needs users to discuss many times in order to solve the semantic consistency problem of one word. Since there might be plenty of words which have semantic consistency problems in synchronous [7] collaborative editing of design documents, this model has a poor efficiency. Moreover, because many sentences and phrases of design documents are produced through users' discussions, the writing style of the documents may not comply with every single user's own. This is called the maintenance of users' editing intentions problem which is another kind of semantic conflicts. Users will feel uncomfortable due to the strange writing style of documents when they are synchronously collaboratively editing design documents. This will have a bad effect on the quality of documents. Therefore the maintenance of users' editing intentions is also of great importance in synchronous collaborative editing. In this paper, we use ontology in synchronous collaborative editing to solve the above two semantic problems. Ontology is an explicit specification of conceptualization [13] and [16]. It has powerful syntax description ability. With the appearance of the ontology description languages such as OIL, SHOE, XOL [9] and [11], ontology can be used in WEB, which further improves syntax description ability of ontology [10], [13] and [14]. Based on ontology, this paper reconstructs the architecture of collaborative editing. We not only solve the semantic consistency of words efficiently in synchronous collaborative editing of design documents but also provide users with individualized services and resolve the maintenance of users' editing intention problems successfully. As a result, the performance of collaborative editing is fundamentally improved. This paper first introduces the semantic problems in the collaborative editing of design documents. Then we discuss the ontology description and use ontology library to reconstruct the architecture of collaborative editing. After that, by making some detailed experiments, we perform a compared analysis to show that semantic collaborative editing not only keeps smaller clients (less storage space) but also localizes many editing operations and thereby improves the performance of collaborative editing. Finally, we discuss the future development of collaborative editing.

In this paper, we introduce ontology to collaborative editing of design documents and propose a new architecture and technology of semantic collaborative editing. It resolves the semantic consistency problem of words and maintains users' editing intentions efficiently. However, there are still a lot of unsolved problems in collaborative editing. For example, there is another kind of semantic conflict: Suppose the original sentence in the design document is ‘Tom forgot lock the door’. User S1 revises it to ‘Tom forgot locking the door’ while user S2 changes it to ‘Tom forgot to lock the door’. In traditional collaborative editing the sentence will be revised to ‘Tom forgot to locking the door’ which is a grammatically wrong sentence [5]. Such a semantic problem is called the semantic consistency problem of structure. We are probably able to use the relationships between concepts in ontology to solve this problem. That is why we adopt ontology instead of thesaurus in this paper. Ontology is an excellent tool for solving semantic problems. In addition, the collaborative editing in Chinese language is an unsolved problem too. Present research on collaborative editing mainly focuses on English. There are lots of Chinese-special techniques needed to solve the semantic consistency of Chinese words.