Semantics-Based Change Impact Analysis for Heterogeneous Collections of Documents

An overwhelming amount of documents is produced and changed every day in most areas of our everyday life, such as, for instance, business, education, research or administration. The documents are seldom isolated artifacts but are related to other documents. Therefore changing one document possibly requires adaptations to other documents. Although dedicated tools may provide some assistance when changing documents, they often ignore other documents or documents of a different type. To resolve that discontinuity, we present a framework that embraces existing document types and supports the declarative specification of semantic annotation and propagation rules inside and across documents of different types, and on which basis we define change impact analysis for heterogeneous collections of documents. The framework is implemented in the tool GMoC which can be used to semantically annotate collections of documents and to analyze the impacts of changes made in different documents of a collection.