Abstract
Collaborative editing systems allow multiple users to edit the same set of documents collaboratively over the computer networks synchronously or asynchronously. Although they face technical challenges similar to those addressed in the literature of distributed computing and database systems, they present a unique set of problems and issues that have not been addressed. For example, timely propagation of user operations across computer networks is needed to promote mutual awareness of users and user activities. This paper presents our prototyped collaborative editing system with a novel and yet extremely efficient mechanism for synchronizing updates from concurrent editors, which has been integrated with the SODA native XML database management system.