Current document management systems (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 and effects of changes 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. Hence, the locutor system aims at providing a management of change functionality for arbitrary XML documents ranging from informal, e.g. instruction or construction manuals, to formal documents, e.g. programs or specifications.

In the locutor project, it is proposed to adapt and extend change management techniques from formal methods to the informal setting. Instead of a formal semantics it is assumed that these documents adopt syntactical and semantic structuring mechanisms formalized in a system ontology (an ontology that formalizes document structure rather than the document contents). This provides a notion of consistency and invariants that allows one to propagate effects of individual changes to entire documents. Conversely, the ontology will provide means to localize effects of changes by introducing a notion for semantic dependencies between document parts.

This ontology-driven management of change integrated into informal document engineering processes will be evaluate on three case studies ranging from eLearning documents over Semantic Wiki pages through to lecture notes. In addition, providing a user-friendly management of change application supports authors in the collaborative and consistent development of educational document. Furthermore, it facilitates the reusability of educational content.