Document Versioning in Digital Libraries

Abstract

Digital libraries are systems that contain organized collections of objects, serving in their most basic functions as a mirror of the traditional library that contains paper documents. Most of the information contained in the collections of a digital library consists of documents, which can evolve with time. That is, a document can be modified to obtain a new document, and digital library users may want access to any of those versions. This introduces in digital libraries the problem of versioning, a problem that has also been considered in a related community, the hypertext community(hypermedia in its most extensive acception).Some domains in which document evolution is very important are the legislative domain (Arnold-Moore, 2000; Martínez-González, 2001; Vitali, 1999), the management of errata made to scientific articles (Poworotznek, 2003) and software construction (Conradi & Westfechtel, 1998).