Extending a structured document model with version control

The paper presents an approach to extend a structured document model with version control. It discusses how the characteristics of the version model used (L.G. Golendziner and C.S. Santos, 1995) fulfil the requirements of a document management application which handles structured documents. A very useful functionality supported is that documents can be managed using the current or specific versions of their components, thus allowing the user to define different strategies to keep the document history. The proposed approach also includes a notification mechanism to address the problem of keeping the references consistent when shared documents are used. The application is the GDOC document management system, which implements an innovative data model for storing documents in a relational database and handles them in an intranet.