In this context, mechanisms usually used for cooperative editing in a local area network are not suitable. The model proposed here is based on a dynamic decomposition of the document into independant parts, maintained by a replicated kernel. The decomposition is controlled by the users themselves, who can then act on the concurrency allowed at the document level. The more a document is fragmented, the more concurrency is allowed. The replication of the independant document parts within the kernel, ensures the document availability and this regardless of the performances of the users' sites.
Communication is reduced to minimum, thus allowing use in large scale distributed system.
Users interact with the kernel either by copying a kernel object to their own local environment where it can be modified, or by handling over the modified object to the kernel. Consistency is managed according to several policies that can be chosen by the user depending on the document maturity or the required interaction with the other users. This criterion maintains the locality property of the linearizability.