Semantic conflicts happen frequently during collaborative editing of design documents. The problem of semantic consistency of words and the maintenance of users' editing intentions are the two major challenges when resolving those semantic conflicts. Based on WordNet this paper presents an ontology description language-FLoDL and introduces it to describe the global ontology library (GOL) and the individual ontology library (IOL) in collaborative editing. By this means, we reconstruct the architecture of collaborative editing and propose a mixed peer-to-peer structured semantic collaborative editing architecture. Then a new algorithm for inserting operations, from which semanticconflicts are often caused, is designed to solve the problem of semantic consistency of words. Moreover, by adding users' individualized semantic information into their IOL, we provide the users with individualized services and successfully maintain users' editing intensions. Finally, through some detailed experiments, we perform a compared analysis to show that semantic collaborative editing not only keeps smaller clients (less storage space) but also localizes many editing operations and thereby improves the performance of collaborative editing. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.