A Comparative Study: Change Detection and Querying Dynamic XML Documents

The efficient management of the dynamic XML documents is a complex area of research. The changes and size of the XML documents throughout its lifetime are limitless. Change detection is an important part of version management to identify difference between successive versions of a document. Document content is continuously evolving. Users wanted to be able to query previous versions, query changes in documents, as well as to retrieve a particular document version efficiently. In this paper we provide comprehensive comparative analysis of various control schemes for change detection and querying dynamic XML documents

Managing and Querying Multi-Version XML Data with Update Logging

With the increasing popularity of storing content on the WWW and intranet in XML form, there arises the need for the control and management of this data. As this data is constantly evolving, users want to be able to query previous versions, query changes in documents, as well as to retrieve a particular document version efficiently. This paper proposes a version management system for XML data that can manage and query changes in an effective and meaningful manner

An Optimistic Approach for Clustering Multi-version XML Documents Using Compressed Delta

Today with Standardization of XML as an information exchange over web, huge amount of information is formatted in the XML document. XML documents are huge in size. The amount of information that has to be transmitted, processed, stored, and queried is often larger than that of other data formats. Also in real world applications XML documents are dynamic in nature. The versatile applicability of XML documents in different fields of information maintenance and management is increasing the demand to store different versions of XML documents with time. However, storage of all versions of an XML document may introduce the redundancy. Self describing nature of XML creates the problem of verbosity,in result documents are in huge size. This paper proposes optimistic approach to Re-cluster multi-version XML documents which change in time by reassessing distance between them by using knowledge from initial clustering solution and changes stored in compressed delta. Evolving size of XML document is reduced by applying homomorphic compression before clustering them which retains its original structure. Compressed delta stores the changes responsible for document versions, without decompressing them. Test results shows that our approach performs much better than using full pair-wise document comparison

Version Aware LibreOffice Documents

Version control systems provide a methodology for maintaining changes in a document over its lifetime and provide better management and control with evolving document collections, such as source code for large software systems. However, no version control system currently supports such functionality for the office documents. An office document can go through different modifications during its lifetime and can be developed by multiple technical or non-technical users. It might be desirable to know how the document came to its final stage and to sometime retrieve older versions of the document or merge two different versions of a document without manual effort. This thesis work explains how we could implement versioning support for LibreOffice documents without using additional infrastructure for version repositories. Since embedding versioning data within the office document can indeed make version control a seamless part of the writing process. Such a modified document with embedded versioning data is called a version aware document. A versioning framework has been developed previously at UWM that provides this versioning functionality for version aware XML documents by calculating the reverse deltas between revisions. A Version Aware XML document integrates full versioning functionality into an XML document type, using XML namespaces to avoid document type errors. Version aware XML documents contain a preamble with versions stored in reverse delta format, plus unique ID attributes attached to the nodes of the documents. They support the full branching and merging functionalities familiar to software engineers, in contrast to the constrained versioning models typical of Office applications. LibreOffice is a free open source office suite that is widely used for document creation and branched off from OpenOffice in 2010. It is managed by The Document Foundation and includes application for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and database. Each document is represented in the Open Office Document Format (ODF), which is a collection of XML files. The current project is an endeavor to show the practicality of the version aware XML documents approach by modifying the LibreOffice document suite to support version awareness. It is necessary to understand the architecture of LibreOffice application as well as the document load and save cycles, the XML element and attribute processing, the class hierarchies and the internal data structures. We have modified the source code of the LibreOffice Writer application to accept and preserve the required changes

A Configuration Management System for Software Product Lines

Software product line engineering (SPLE) is a methodology for developing a family of software products in a particular domain by systematic reuse of shared code in order to improve product quality and reduce development time and cost. Currently, there are no software configuration management (SCM) tools that support software product line evolution. Conventional SCM tools are designed to support single product development. The use of conventional SCM tools forces developers to treat a software product line as a single software project by introducing new programming language constructs or using conditional compilation. We propose a research conguration management prototype called Molhado SPL that is designed specifically to support the evolution of software product lines. Molhado SPL addresses the evolution problem at the configuration level instead of at the code level. We studied the type of operations needed to support the evolution of software product lines and proposed a versioning model and eight cases of change propagation. Molhado SPL supports independent evolution of core assets and products, the sharing of code and the tracking relationships between products and shared code, and the eight cases of change propagation. The Molhado SPL consists of four layers with each layer providing a different type of service. At the heart of Molhado SPL are the versioning model, component object, shared component object, and project objects that allow for independent evolution of products and shared artifacts, for sharing, and for supporting change propagation. Furthermore,they allow product specific changes to shared code without interfering with the core asset that is shared. Products can also introduce product specific assets that only exist in that product. In order to for Molhado SPL to support product line, we implemented XML merging, feature model editing and debugging, and version-aware XML documents. To support merging of XML documents, we implemented a 3-way XML document merging algorithm that uses versioned data structures, change detection, and node identity. To support software product line derivation or modeling of software product line, we implemented support for feature model including editing and debugging. Finally, we created the version-aware XML document framework to support collaborative editing of XML documents without requiring a version repository. The version history is embedded in the documents using XML namespaces, so that the documents remain valid under the XML specification. The version-aware XML framework can also be used to support the exporting of documents from Molhado SPL repository to be edit outside and import back the change history made to the document. We evaluated Molhado SPL with two product lines: a document product line and a the graph data structures product line. This evaluation showed that Molhado SPL supports independently evolution of products and core assets and the eight change propagation cases. We did not evaluate MolhadoSPL in terms of scalability or usability. The main contributions of this dissertation research are: 1) Molhado SPL that supports the evolution of product lines, 2) a fast 3-way XML merge algorithm, 3) a version-aware XML document framework, and 4) a feature model editor and debugger

Temporal XML: Version Management and Temporal Query Processing

The changes that can be made to a document throughout its lifetime are limitless. Temporal management of documents with multiple versions is a complex area of research that has risen from the need to preserve information. Today’s technology-driven society is rapidly moving towards web environments and using XML as the format of choice of information representation and exchange. The proposed solutions is an implementation of a temporal XML version management system that stores and reconstructs multiple versions of XML documents, as well as provide temporal query capabilities that show how the document has changed over time

An integrated approach to preparing, publishing, presenting and preserving theses

[Abstract]: This paper describes progress on a project funded by the Australian government to create Free software; the Integrated Content Environment for research and scholarship (ICE-RS). ICE-RS is a multi-faceted project which will add value to finished theses by making them available in both HTML and PDF, as well as providing a mechanism for packaging multimedia theses. The project will also concentrate on providing services for thesis production, with version control, automated backup and collaboration services. The paper begins with the established content management system that is the basis for the project, ICE-RS , originally developed to create courseware packages. ICE includes distributed, version controlled collaboration, using word processing software and works on multiple platforms, with standard document formats. We survey other approaches to content authoring and publishing for ETDs. We showcase exploratory work on integration of the thesis writing process with Institutional Repository software including publishing theses in both PDF and HTML with preservation and descriptive metadata. The presentation will include demonstrations of thesis production at all stages of development from proposal to completion. In a more speculative vein, we will discuss opportunities for institutions to provide new levels of support for candidates via automated thesis “dashboard” progress reports, supervisor and examiner annotation and comment and support for copyright considerations as early as possible in the process

EDI - XML Standards and Technologies in the Agri-Food Industry

Due to globalisation, the new technological developments and the complexity of food supply processes, the European food sector is increasingly becoming more complex. The consumers’ trust in food, triggered and affected by a number of food crises, is low. Today, consumers increasingly expect safe and high quality food and demand information about the origin of their food. Also, the economic health of the food industry can be greatly affected by food crises; therefore, efficient and effective mechanisms are required to assist the food industry in tracking and tracing products along the food chain. In this paper, we discuss the criteria for an efficient and effective traceability system from an IT perspective (mainly data exchange) and we identify key requirements for ICT enabled traceability