Maintaining islands of consistency via versioned links

Abstract

One of the core tasks of technical communication and knowledge management is maintaining the internal and external consistency of document collections. The design of (technical) communication infrastructures has to take this into account from the start. Consistency of static collections is enforced by format constraints (e.g. specified in a schema and validated grammatically). Recently, consistency in mutable knowledge collections can be supported by change management systems, that draw on specified semantics for knowledge objects and their relations. But even with machine support a seemingly minor change can easily cascade into a major adaptation task. In this paper we argue that the practice of maintaining "islands of consistency" in mutable knowledge collections can be supported by versioned links: Links as first-class elements defined by a triple of versioned elements (subject/predicate/object). The main idea explored here is that changes need not be propagated to linked elements, if those still reference the originally linked object. With this concept a major adaptation task can be put under user-friendly impact management. We give a model for versioned links that is easy to embed in existing systems and show how this concept supports impact management workflows.

Workflows for the Management of Change in Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics

“…One of the main conceptual problems to be solved here is how to deal with propagating changes by "other authors". For that we plan to build in the notion of versioned links proposed in [13]. Finally, the current policy to eagerly trigger the change impact analysis after each edit may be undesirable in situations where the author wants to perform several small edits, which currently may result in many spurious impacts.…”

The Planetary System: Web 3.0 & Active Documents for STEM

“…Adding versioned references [29] (facilitated by the TNTBase storage) allows incremental document/content commons development and commenting workflows to be managed in distributed teams. Building on the Planetary system's user management, we can extend this into a localized refereeing feature.…”

“…The main conceptual problem to be solved here is how to deal with propagating changes by "other authors". For that we plan to build in the notion of versioned links proposed in [29] in addition to our TNTBase versioned storage.…”