Semantic versioning of in-process scientific document

Abstract

The development of scientific documents is an iterative process. Scientific documents go through a continuous informal review phase during writing process and as a result keep changing. The informal review changes are casually recorded. The key issue for maintaining the changes in scientific document is to maintain the review history of individual components within source file at component level. Scientific document is meaningfully organized and it can be easily transformed into an ontology. For this purpose, we use Document Ontology to map each component of the scientific document and manage changes in this ontology by enhancing an already existing technique of semantic repository versioning. In this paper, we explore document change process using semantic versioning and provide the review comments history along each change. In addition, we define a usage scenario to present the viability and benefit of our approach. To achieve this, we developed a prototype system which represents the meaningful track of change in individual components of a scientific document, provides the review comments history along each change and at the end of document writing the author can see the progress report. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.