Acceptance of new Change-Tracking Proposal

[Svante Schubert <svante.schubert@gmail.com>]

Dear TC,

the Advanced Collaboration SC has decided not to accept any further change-tracking (CT) proposals, unless being directed to do so by the TC [1].
Therefore I would like to ask you to direct the SC to accept my approach [2, 3, 4] as a new proposal.

For those not following the discussions in detail, I would like to give a short subjective summary:

Generic Change Tracking (GCT) proposal

GCT uses solely the XML layer for tracking the changes. It has a generic approach, a very short specification and is very nice for ODF application using an XML model.
For all ODF application not using an XML model it is problematic. It is sometimes very hard for their developers to find the correct mapping between the XML change and their application model.

Extended Change Tracking (ECT) proposal

ECT is extending the given ODF change-tracking. Similar to GCT it is tracking the ODF XML changes in the document.

Collaboration based Change Tracking (CCT) proposal -- [NEW]

CCT Collaboration Change tracking has its origin from collaboration. The design is already based on collaboration requirements.
The goal was to unify a solution of change-tracking and future collaboration to avoid overlapping functionality and incompatibilities in the future.

While every proposal needs to specify what minimum set of ODF changes should be supported to guarantee a consistent support, CCT also specifies what ODF XML change an operation will trigger.
By doing so CCT is able to reference to the specified changes without tracking the XML change in detail in the document. Minimizing document size and simplifying CT to a maximum for users by abstracting the operation from the XML details.
In addition to the usual change-tracking features, CCT might enable additional features related to collaboration features:

1. Merging of documents (revealing unresolvable merge conflicts to the application/user)
2. History functionality of document
3. Applying changes to other documents
4. Ability to save the work of off-line collaboration
   
5. ...
   

A future ODF collaboration approach might wire exact the same operation over the net being used for CT. The CT operation being the lingua franca of ODF, allowing even a browser (HTML) based office and OOo to have collaboration sessions.

I am currently working on a formal proposal, extending the explanation earlier given on the SC list [1, 2, 3, 4].

Kind regards,
Svante

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-collab/201109/msg00038.html
[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-collab/201108/msg00023.html
[3] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-collab/201108/msg00024.html
[4] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-collab/201108/msg00025.html