A configuration mechanism for versioned documents

This paper presents an approach to configuration definition based on attributes of structured documents. The application of this mechanism is the GDOC (acronym for Document Management, in Portuguese) system, which implements an innovative data model for storing documents in a relational database and handles them in an intranet. The GDOC system supports document evolution, expressed by the version concept, which maintains the document history. The use of versions, associated with composite documents, allows the existence of many possibilities for the description of the same document, as a consequence of different version combination. In order to obtain a single description of a document, called document configuration, it is necessary to select a version of each component document. In this work, the version selection is done using document characteristics, represented by their attributes. The configuration mechanism also includes the verification of compatibility between component versions, performed with the assistance of rules, generating a consistent configuration.