System for Tracking Changes in a Collaborative Document Editing Environment

摘要

This invention discloses a novel system and method for displaying electronic documents on remote devices and enabling collaborative editing where the system tracks revisions, comments and other content between versions of the document by maintaining hierarchical representation of the version and mapping locations between the hierarchies.

主权项

1. A method for tracking locations of content in a document, said document comprised of content and said document being embodied by a first and second version and a first rendition of a comparison between the two versions, each an individual data file, comprising:
generating for each of the first and second versions of the document, a corresponding data structure representing a hierarchical representation of the content comprising each corresponding version of the document; generating a data structure representing a hierarchical representation of the content comprising the first comparison rendition; for at least one piece of content present in the first version, generating a data structure representing a mapping of the location of such content to the location of the content in the second version by means of determining a mapping from the location of the content in the first version to a location of the content in the first comparison rendition and a determining of a mapping from the location of the content in the first comparison rendition to the location of the content in the second version.