Document version control in collaborative environment

• US 10,599,753 B1
• Filed: 11/11/2013
• Issued: 03/24/2020
• Est. Priority Date: 11/11/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Inventors: Eisner, Noah Anthony, Gillett, Kevin, Khurana, Himanshu, Sethuramalingam, Arun Ponniah, Wang, Liangliang, Kala, Sharad, Chen, Frank
• Primary Examiner(s): Huynh, Thu V
• Application Number:
  US14/077,210
• Time in Patent Office: 2,325 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/169 Annotation, e.g. comment data or footnotes
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/194 Calculation of difference between files
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/197 Version control for software G06F8/71

Abstract

Organizations maintain and generate large amounts of documentation and entities of these organizations often need to collaborate on generating and reviewing this information. There is a need to maintain and store this documentation remotely in such a way that the entities of these organizations may collaborate with each other. To ensure that information is handled effectively, new versions are created for documents uploaded to a service provider by entities of the organization. The documents are processed in such a way that the documents are displayed uniformly across a variety of devices.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

obtaining, from a user, a request to generate a new version of a document, the request comprising document information that is locally stored on a user computing device and specifies a set of user interactions with the document;

causing the document information to be preserved on the user computing device until the new version of the document is generated; and

processing the document information to generate the new version of the document, by at least;

entering the document into a bloom filter;

inverting the bloom filter to determine that the document does not correspond to one or more previous versions of the document;

as a result, updating metadata corresponding to the new version of the document in a database;

generating a new overlay containing information corresponding to interactions with words in the document information, a new underlay containing information corresponding to the words in the document information, and a new coordinate map specifying location coordinates of characters in the new underlay; and

storing the new coordinate map, the new underlay, and the new overlay in a storage system as the new version of the document such that the new version of the document and all other versions of the document are accessible simultaneously, the new underlay stored separately from the document.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein obtaining the new version of the document to be stored remotely from the user further includes obtaining information indicating user selection of text in the document and associated annotations.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2, wherein generating the new overlay includes generating, based at least in part on the information indicating user selection of text in the document and associated annotations, the new overlay such that the new overlay comprises information indicating how to display the associated annotations based at least in part on coordinates of the user selection of text relative to the location coordinates specified in the new coordinate map.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein updating metadata corresponding to the new version of the document includes generating version identification information for the new version of the document and associating the version identification information with document identification information corresponding to the document.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the computer-implemented method further includes:

determining one or more other users specified as a collaborator of the document; and

transmitting to the one or more other users of the document an indication that the new version of the document has been created.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the computer-implemented method further includes restoring, based at least in part on a request from the user, a previous version of the document.

7. A system, comprising:

one or more processors; and

memory with instructions that, upon execution by the one or more processors, cause the system to;

obtain, over a network, a request to generate a new version of a document from a user, the request comprising document information that is locally stored on a user computing device and specifies a set of user interactions with the document;

cause the set of user interactions to be preserved locally on the user computing device even when another request to generate the new version of the document is obtained from another computing device; and

as a result of obtaining the request, process the document information to generate the new version of the document by at least;

adding the document information to a probabilistic data structure;

determining that the document information does not match at least one other document information included in the probabilistic data structure by at least inverting the probabilistic data structure;

updating a database entry corresponding to the document to include information corresponding to the new version of the document;

generating a coordinate map, an underlay and an overlay based at least in part on the document information, the underlay containing information corresponding to text in the document information, and the coordinate map specifying location coordinates of characters in the underlay; and

updating a search index based at least in part on information corresponding to the document, the coordinate map being stored and transmitted separately from the document.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein the memory further includes instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the system to:

determine if a version of the document includes changed content relative to a previous version of the document by at least;

generating, based at least in part on the version of the document including associated data indicating user interaction with text in the version of the document, a first hash;

generating, based at least in part on a previous version of the document including second associated data indicating user interaction with text in the previous version of the document, a second hash; and

performing a comparison between the first hash and the second hash, wherein storing the document as the new version is conditioned upon on a determination that the version is different than the previous version based on a result of the comparison.

9. The system of claim 7, wherein obtaining the version of the document from the user further includes obtaining, from the user, secondary information corresponding to the document.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein the obtained secondary information corresponding to the version of the document includes, at least one of, user selection of text in the document, comments on the document, or user selection of text in the document with associated annotations.

11. The system of claim 9, wherein generating the overlay is performed such that the overlay includes the secondary information corresponding to the document.

12. The system of claim 7, wherein updating the database entry corresponding to the document includes writing a uniform resource location of the document into a database containing the database entry.

13. The system of claim 7, wherein the memory further includes instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the system to, as a result of a request from the user, roll the document back to a previous version.

14. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing executable instructions that, upon execution by one or more processors of a computer system, cause the computer system to at least:

determine that document information for generating a new version of a document has been obtained from data storage of a user device, the document information including data corresponding to a set of user interactions with the document;

cause the document information to be continuously stored on the data storage in response to submission of a request; and

as a result of determining that the document information has been uploaded, cause the computer system to process the document information to at least;

include the document in a data structure, the data structure used to track version history of the document;

generate a determination that the document does not correspond to one or more previous versions of the document included in the data structure by at least inverting the data structure;

as a result of the determination, update a database entry corresponding to the document such that the database entry contains information corresponding to the new version of the document;

generate at least an overlay based at least in part on the data corresponding to the set of user interactions, an underlay based at least in part on text extracted from the document, and a coordinate map specifying location coordinates of characters in the underlay; and

make the new version of the document and at least one previous version of the document available, the underlay being stored separately from the data storage in which the document is stored.

15. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions further comprise instructions that, upon execution by the one or more processors, cause the computer system to notify a user based at least in part on a result of updating the database entry corresponding to the document.

16. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions that cause the computer system to determine the new version of the document has been uploaded further include instructions that cause the computer system to determine that changes have been made to the document.

17. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the data associated with the document includes information based on a user'"'"'s interaction with the document.

18. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions that cause the computer system to generate at least the underlay further include instructions that cause the computer system to generate a coordinate map of each word in the document based at least in part on the document.

19. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions that cause the computer system to update the database entry corresponding to the document further include instructions that cause the computer system to update the database entry with a timestamp corresponding to the time at which uploading of the document was completed.

20. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions that cause the computer system to update the database entry corresponding to the document further include instructions that cause the computer system to associate, in the database entry corresponding to the document, a new version identification corresponding to the new version of the document that has been uploaded.

21. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions further comprise instructions that, upon execution by the one or more processors, cause the computer system to:

generate a change log that indicates one or more differences between different versions of the document;

obtain a selection specifying at least one of the one or more of the differences indicated in the change log; and

transmit a particular version of the document corresponding to the selection.

22. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the executable instructions further comprise instructions that, upon execution by the one or more processors, cause the computer system to:

obtain, from a user, information indicating a particular version of the document;

determine a location of the particular version of the document and a particular version of a particular overlay corresponding to the particular version of the document; and

transmit the particular version of the document and the particular version of the overlay to the user.