DocEng 2011: A Generic Calculus of XML Editing Deltas

The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering Mountain View, California, USA September 19-22, 2011 A Generic Calculus of XML Editing Deltas Presented by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury. We outlined a mathematical model of the so-called XML editing deltas and proposed a first study of their formal properties. We expected at least three outputs from this theoretical work: a common basis to compare performances of the various algorithms through a structural normalization of deltas, a universal and exible patch application model and a clearer separation of patch and merge engine performance from delta generation performance. This paper presents the full calculus and reports significant progresses with respect to formalizing a normalization procedure. Such method is key to defining an equivalence relation between editing scripts and eventually designing optimizers compiler back-ends, new patch specification languages and execution models.