Collaborative editors allow different users to work together on a common task. Such tasks range from using a shared calendar to realizing software programmed by users located at distant sites. This concept was invented in 1972 with SCCS. In the last years, this paradigm became popular (ex. Wikipedia). Decentralization and asynchronicity are essential in this approach, leading to peer-to-peer (P2P) models. Meanwhile, the XML format has arrived as the de facto standard for editing and exchanging documents. Our work aims at defining a collaborative editor for semi-structured documents, which provide an abstraction of the XML format. The problem is difficult since many previous approaches are flawed or not scalable. Firstly, we describe the basic concepts on collaborative edition and network models and we give the state of the art of this topic. Then, we investigate two different approaches : the operational transformation (OT) approach and the Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) approach for different (tree-like) data structures. Our goal is to ensure the convergence of the editing process with the basic operations (Add, Del and rename a node. We have proposed a new generic algorithm based on semantic independence in data structure for CRDT approach. We have extended our results by dealing with the operation that moves a subtree and with XML schema compliance. Few works have been devoted to these extensions which are useful in collaborative edition. Finally, we provide experimental results obtained from our implementation that validate our approach.
