Evolvable Documents - an Initial Conceptualization

摘要

We may say that documents are one of the cornerstones of our civilization. Information technologies enabled unparalleled flexibility and power for retrieving, storing, and sharing documents. However, in a daily documents-intensive job, one needs to deal with severe complications of documents evolvability and reusability of their parts. Maintaining consistency across several documents and their versions is typically a tedious and error-prone task. Similar evolvability challenges have been dealt with in software engineering and principles such as modularity, loose coupling, and separation of concerns have been studied and applied. There is a hypothesis that they may help in the domain of evolvable documents, as well. We perceive devising a conceptualization of documents as the first step in this endeavor. In this paper, we present a generic conceptualization leading to evolvable documents applicable in any documentation domain, and we propose next steps.