eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become the standard representation format for structured documents in different fields. When several authors are expected to work collaboratively, it is very important for one to know what others have done and to merge, integrate consistently their effort into a sigle work. This task can be done manually for relatively small contributions, but quickly becomes
... [Show full abstract] time consuming and error prone if the contributions are comprehensive. Therefore, an automatic tool is desired. Substantial research to this end have been carried out and commonly grouped by the theme ”XML Document Diff & Merge”. Although time and memory efficient implementations exist, most of them are generic and data oriented. As a result they are not necessarily appropriate for text-based documents, or fragmented documents, such as used by SCENARI, as they lack the logic of presentation, usage and decision for end-users, authors. After a comparative study of various existing implementations, we chose one of them, ”XML 3-way Differencing and Merging Tool”. On the latter, we made improvements and developed what we called ”interactive merge” which objective is to make intelligible and interactive merging for text-based XML documents. The experiments were performed on real Scenari documents. Based on the results of our experiments, we propose some optimizations to increase the performance and the quality of structured & fragmented document diff & merge.
