Curated by Alex Kessinger

Operational transformation (OT) is a technology for supporting a range of collaboration functionalities in advanced groupware systems. OT was originally invented for consistency maintenance and concurrency control in collaborative editing of plain text documents. Two decades of research has extended its capabilities and expanded its applications to include group undo, locking, conflict resolution, operation notification and compression, group-awareness, HTML/XML and tree-structured document editing, collaborative office productivity tools, application-sharing, and collaborative computer-aided media design tools (see OTFAQ). Recently, OT has been adopted as a core technique behind the collaboration features in Google Wave and Google Docs, which are taking OT to a new range of web-based applications.