In e-business, creating a common concept set for business integration, interoperation and interaction has to consider the heterogeneity reality of different interpretations from multiple concept providers. Maintaining semantic consistency between multiple concept providers is a difficult problem. To solve this problem, this paper first reviewed the existing technologies of collaborative editing systems and consistency maintenance in the areas of both CSCW and e-business. Based on the discussion of existing technologies, it then proposes a novel CHCES approach, which divides a collaborative editing system into two layers in topology and introduces four strategies to edit common concepts between the two layers. A set of operations is designed, which demonstrates the solution. Author Keywords Semantic consistency, collaborative editing, concept ACM Classification Keywords H.5 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces – Collaborative computing; Web-bas...