(Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, 2016-04) Le Roux, Pierre Bernard; Kroon, Steve; Bester, Willem
In an attempt to tackle shortcomings of current approaches to collaborating on the development of structured
data sets, we present a prototype platform that allows users to share and collaborate on the development of data
structures via a web application, or by using language bindings or an API. Using techniques from the theory
of persistent linked data structures, the resulting platform delivers automatically version-controlled map and
graph abstract data types as a web service. The core of the system is provided by a Hash Array Mapped Trie
(HAMT) which is made confluently persistent by path-copying. The system aims to make efficient use of
storage, and to have consistent access and update times regardless of the version being accessed or modified.