Maintaining islands of consistency via versioned links

  • Authors:

  • Andrea Kohlhase;Michael Kohlhase

  • Affiliations:

  • Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany;Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
  • Year:
  • 2011

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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.