ASTS: A string-wise address space transformation algorithm for real-time collaborative editing

The address space transformation (AST) algorithm is proposed to solve the classical consistency maintenance problem in real-time collaborative editing systems, which is widely adopted in web 2.0, mobile comment and itinerary planning applications. None of the state-of-art AST approaches, however, support string-wise operations natively. They normally split a string into individual characters, thus eliciting low efficiency when user-based operations such as copy and paste are executed. In this paper, we propose a string-wise address space transformation algorithm called ASTS which mainly aims to address two challenges as follows: (1) How to construct a simple model for the string-wise operation. (2) How to maintain stable and high response algorithm performance. Two experiments are given to verify the adopted algorithm's effectiveness in diverse perspective. Compared with traditional AST algorithm, our experiments show that ASTS has improved in string-wise operation environment and also performs well in character-wise environment.