We live in the information age: Huge amounts of information are available at our fingertips and computers influence every aspect in our lives. In particular we have to deal with an increasing amount of e-documents in research as well as in industries. Therefore the research on Document Engineering is concerned with principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain documents. However only a few aspects of this broad research field found their way into practice, e.g. document management systems (DMS).

Current DMS are designed to coordinate the collaborative creation and maintenance process of documents through the provision of a centralized repository. The focus is primarily on managing documents themselves. Relations between and within documents as well as effect of changes on these relations are largely neglected, although information reuse and distribution could seriously benefit from such a relation management. Therefore human reviewers are needed for management of change (MoC), i.e., to maintain consistency after modifications. A costly, tedious, and error-prone factor in document life-cycles that is often neglected to cut cost leading to sub-optimal and often disastrous results.

To avoid resulting inefficiencies, conflicts, and delays, and to emphasize the importance of common information spaces in decentralized working environments the integration of a system support into DMS to manage modifications as well as relations is indispensable.

The design of the locutor system aims to provide management of change functionality for arbitrary XML documents ranging from informal, e.g. instruction or construction manuals, to formal documents, e.g. software specifications.

The implementation of locutor, based on SVNKit, is currently in a prototype stage, but even the first released version is a complete replacement/improvement of the original SVN client. That means, thanks to SVNKit no further SVN client has to have be installed on the system. Even in the case another SVN client is already installed, locutor won't interfere, but rather work in parallel with the installed one.