Semantic Management of Heterogeneous Documents

Abstract

Software Engineering or other design processes produce a variety of different documents written in different formats and formalizations, and interwoven by various relations and dependencies. Working on such document collections is not a simple progression of developing one document after the other, but it’s the art of orchestrating a synchronous development of the entire document collection. Design decisions made in one document influence the appearance of others and modifications made to one document have to be propagated along the various interrelations throughout the document collection. In contrast, tool support typically focuses on individual document types ignoring dependencies between different document types, which likely results in inconsistencies between individual documents of the collection.

In this paper we will advocate a semantic management of heterogeneous documents that orchestrates the evolution of the individual documents with the help of specialized tools. Such a management monitors the design process, takes care of the various dependencies between documents, analyses the consequences of changes made in one document to others, and engineers the synchronization steps necessary to obtain a consistent document collection. The semantic basis of such an approach are ontologies formalizing the structuring mechanisms and interrelations of individual document types.