locutor is library focusing on smart management of change on semi-structured documents.

Motivation

We live in the information age: Huge amounts of information are available at our fingertips and computers influence every aspect in our lives. In particular we have to deal with an increasing amount of e-documents in research as well as in industries. Therefore the research on Document Engineering is concerned with principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain documents. However only a few aspects of this broad research field found their way into practice, e.g. document management systems (DMS).

Current DMS are designed to coordinate the collaborative creation and maintenance process of documents through the provision of a centralized repository. The focus is primarily on managing documents themselves. Relations between and within documents as well as effect of changes on these relations are largely neglected, although information reuse and distribution could seriously benefit from such a relation management. Therefore human reviewers are needed for management of change (MoC), i.e., to maintain consistency after modifications. A costly, tedious, and error-prone factor in document life-cycles that is often neglected to cut cost leading to sub-optimal and often disastrous results.

To avoid resulting inefficiencies, conflicts, and delays, and to emphasize the importance of common information spaces in decentralized working environments the integration of a system support into DMS to manage modifications as well as relations is indispensable.

Integrating locutor in such systems, one can identify and maintain references within and between documents. Consequently, if locutor receives a change upon, for example, updating a file under version control, it is not only able to determine its semantic relevance, but also to compute the effects of the change and determine the set of affected information units (INFOM) within and between dependent documents. The design of locutor aims to provide management of change functionality for arbitrary semi-structured documents ranging from informal, e.g. instruction or construction manuals, to formal documents, e.g. software specifications.

Requirements

• scaup
• scalaxx
• GrGen V2.6RC2

Features

• Change Impact Analysis (CIA)
• Redundancy resolution on Subversion externals definitions
• Cycle detection on Subversion externals definitions
• Registry support for Subversion working copies
• Semantic difference computation based on a sophisticated equality theory (cf. scalaxx project).

Note: The usage of the version control system Subversion is a proof of concept only, i.e. in general the described/ implemented algorithms are applicable on any version control system.

Work In-Progress

• An eclipse locutor plug-in for Smart Management of Change on OMDoc Documents (M.Sc. Thesis)