Maintaining constraints expressed as formulas in collaborative systems

—Constraints allow users to declare relationships among objects and let the constraint systems maintain and satisfy these relationships. Formulas have been adopted to express constraints in a wide variety of single-user applications, because of their simplicity, efficiency and manageability. The needs and benefits of supporting formula-defined constraints in collaborative environments have long been recognized. However, maintaining both constraints and consistency in the presence of concurrency in collaborative systems is a challenge. In these systems, users may concurrently define formulas, which could result in that different formulas are defined to express the same objectattribute at different sites. In this article, we discuss the issues and techniques in maintaining formula-defined constraints in collaborative systems. In particular, we also proposed a method that is able to maintain both constraints and system consistency in concurrent environments based on the existing consist...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: COLCOM
• Authors: Kai Lin, David Chen, R. Geoff Dromey, Chengzheng Sun
• Keywords: COLCOM 2007, Collaborative Systems, Consistency, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Formula-defined Constraints