Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 11, numbers 3 and 4, 2018 // View article

Towards Evolvable Documents with a Conceptualization-Based Case Study

Authors:
Marek Suchánek
Robert Pergl

Keywords: Electronic Documents; Evolvability; Modularity; Conceptualization; OntoUML; Case Study; Separation of Concerns.

Abstract:
Documents surround us in our everyday lives and affect us even without noticing it. Information technology brought an evolution to documents in terms of flexibility and efficiency in their composing, processing, and sharing. However, in these days, an electronic document lacks the evolvability and reusability of its parts. Maintaining the consistency across one or even several documents and their versions makes it a very complicated task. We encounter a similar problem in the software development domain where, however, effective principles and techniques have been developed and adopted. Incorporating modularity, design patterns, loose coupling, separation of concerns, and other principles are being successfully applied to achieve evolvability. Results are proven in decades by scientific research and countless practical applications. Hypothetically, such principles may be used also for documents in order to achieve reliable and easy-to-maintain documents. This paper presents our generic conceptualization leading to evolvable documents and which is applicable in any documentation domain based on related work in the electronic documents, as well as the evolvable software development domains. Advantages and core ideas of our conceptualization are then demonstrated in a case study -- prototype design of OntoUML modelling language documentation. Finally, possible next steps for generic evolvable documents are proposed, as we perceive our contribution as the first step in the journey towards evolvable documents in the scientific point of view. The results from this paper can be used for further research and as the first boilerplate for designing custom evolvable documentation.

Pages: 212 to 223

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2018. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2018

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679