Section: Research Program

Consistency Models for Distributed Collaborative Systems

Collaborative systems are distributed systems that allow users to share data. One important issue is to manage consistency of shared data according to concurrent access. Traditional consistency criteria such as serializability, linearizability are not adequate for collaborative systems.

Causality, Convergence and Intention preservation (CCI)   [25] are more suitable for developing middleware for collaborative applications.

We develop algorithms for ensuring CCI properties on collaborative distributed systems. Constraints on the algorithms are different according to the kind of distributed system and to the data structure. The distributed system can be centralized, decentralized or peer-to-peer. The type of data can include strings, growable arrays, ordered trees, semantic graphs and multimedia data.