Workflows for the Management of Change in Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for managing changes in semi-formal mathematical documents by integrating semantic annotations into a flexible publishing system, enabling impact analysis and workflow integration.

Contribution

It extends change management techniques to semi-formal mathematical documents, combining semantic annotations with flexible intermixing of formulas and language.

Findings

Semantic annotations support impact analysis in semi-formal documents.

Change management requires more user interaction in flexiformal settings.

Integration into workflows enhances document management processes.

Abstract

Mathematical knowledge is a central component in science, engineering, and technology (documentation). Most of it is represented informally, and -- in contrast to published research mathematics -- subject to continual change. Unfortunately, machine support for change management has either been very coarse grained and thus barely useful, or restricted to formal languages, where automation is possible. In this paper, we report on an effort to extend change management to collections of semi-formal documents which flexibly intermix mathematical formulas and natural language and to integrate it into a semantic publishing system for mathematical knowledge. We validate the long-standing assumption that the semantic annotations in these flexiformal documents that drive the machine-supported interaction with documents can support semantic impact analyses at the same time. But in contrast to the fully formal setting, where adaptations of impacted documents can be automated to some degree, the flexiformal setting requires much more user interaction and thus a much tighter integration into document management workflows.