Proceedings

Abstract:

Conflict is a recurring feature of human existence. Whenever a society or a system evolves over time, with people introducing their own agendas according to their own priorities, there will inevitably be different and inconsistent ideas and plans - these are the basis of conflict. Only with stasis and death does conflict end, so we should see conflict as a sign of vitality and growth, not as something to be avoided.

From a data processing perspective, though, conflicts lead to problems. Conflict resolution is required wherever we have multiple concurrent changes to a single information set. In practical terms this applies, for example, to concurrent editing environments, to replicated database instances which are being updated independently, to address-book changes on a PDA that must be merged into a master database that has itself been changed.

Resolving these conflicts very often requires human intervention. This paper looks at the use of XML forms of various types to reduce the drudgery involved and to take advantage some of the greatest strengths of XML, using pipelining and easily-understood representations to allow a decision-maker to work with minimal drag.

We take a look at current implementations, and ask how much of this vision can currently be made a reality.