Towards XML version control of office documents Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:382659, abstract = {Office applications such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are widely used to edit the majority of today's business documents: office documents. Usually, version control systems consider office documents as binary objects, thus severely hindering collaborative work. Since XML has become a de-facto standard for office applications, we focus on versioning office documents by structured XML version control approaches. This enables state-of-the-art version control for office documents.A basic prerequisite to XML version control is a diff algorithm, which detects structural changes between XML documents. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art XML diff algorithms w.r.t. their suitability to OpenOffice XML documents and the future OASIS office document standard. It turns out that, due to the specific XML office format, a careful examination of the diff algorithm characteristics is necessary. Therefore, we identify important features for XML diff approaches to handle office documents. We have implemented a first OpenOffice versioning API that can be used in version control systems as a replacement for line-based or binary diffs, which are currently used.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {R\"{o}nnau, Sebastian and Scheffczyk, Jan and Borghoff, Uwe M.}, booktitle = {DocEng '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Document engineering}, citeulike-article-id = {382659}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1096601.1096606}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1096601.1096606}, doi = {10.1145/1096601.1096606}, isbn = {1-59593-240-2}, keywords = {version-control, xml}, location = {Bristol, United Kingdom}, pages = {10--19}, posted-at = {2009-11-03 13:21:59}, priority = {0}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Towards XML version control of office documents}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1096601.1096606}, year = {2005} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:382659 L3 - citeulike-article-id:382659 N2 - Office applications such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are widely used to edit the majority of today's business documents: office documents. Usually, version control systems consider office documents as binary objects, thus severely hindering collaborative work. Since XML has become a de-facto standard for office applications, we focus on versioning office documents by structured XML version control approaches. This enables state-of-the-art version control for office documents.A basic prerequisite to XML version control is a diff algorithm, which detects structural changes between XML documents. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art XML diff algorithms w.r.t. their suitability to OpenOffice XML documents and the future OASIS office document standard. It turns out that, due to the specific XML office format, a careful examination of the diff algorithm characteristics is necessary. Therefore, we identify important features for XML diff approaches to handle office documents. We have implemented a first OpenOffice versioning API that can be used in version control systems as a replacement for line-based or binary diffs, which are currently used. CY - Bristol, United Kingdom SN - 1-59593-240-2 AD - New York, NY, USA EP - 19 TI - Towards XML version control of office documents PB - ACM T2 - DocEng '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Document engineering SP - 10 KW - version-control KW - xml AU - Rönnau, Sebastian AU - Scheffczyk, Jan AU - Borghoff, Uwe PY - 2005/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1096601.1096606 ER -