“KWARC was!”

Subversion, CVS, and many other version control systems use a copy-modify-merge versioning model. In this model, each user’s client contacts the project repository and creates a personal working copy. Users then work simultaneously and independently, modifying their private copies. Finally, the private copies are merged together into a new, final version. The version control system often assists with the merging, but ultimately a human being is responsible for making it happen correctly. In particular, if changes of one author overlap with changes of another one. This situation is called a conflict. A common believe is that software can’t automatically resolve conflicts; only humans are capable of understanding and making the necessary intelligent choices. Henceforth I call this the conflict resolution paradigm.

However, I don’t agree on this commonly accepted paradigm! Instead, I propose using structural semantic techniques in conjunction w/ equality theory allows for offering semi-automated management of change to increase machine readability and understanding, respectively, and thus to decrease costs of manually resolving conflicts!

Structural semantics enables the computation of dependencies and thus the computation of long-range effects of changes. That is, local changes respecting dependency relations can be automatically propagated and adapted. Equality theory, on the other hand, enables to reduce conflicts at all, in a sense, where are no changes there could be no conflicts. That is, changes respecting equivalence relations are no changes in this sense and do not have to be propagated and merged, respectively.

So, eventually to reduce conflicts in and ease collaborative work-flow processes we have to clarify (on the conceptual level) and formalize (on the technical level) the conceptualities “dependency”, “dependency types”, “change types”, and “propagation” w.r.t. respective equality theories. In my PhD thesis I am currently working on both the conceptual and technical level to end up w/ a general management of change methodology. As a proof of concept in the application area of collaborative authoring processes I use my prototype system locutor.

/nm

This entry was posted by Normen Müller on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 4:15 pm and is filed under locutor, Management of Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.