Document Changes: Modeling, Detection, Storage and Visualization (DChanges 2014) Gioele Barabucci
Angelo Di Iorio
Cologne Center for eHumanities Universität zu Köln Cologne, Germany
Department of Computer Science Università di Bologna Bologna, Italy
[email protected] Uwe M. Borghoff
[email protected] Sonja Maier
Institute for Software Technology Universität der Bundeswehr München Neubiberg, Germany
Institute for Software Technology Universität der Bundeswehr München Neubiberg, Germany
[email protected]
[email protected] Ethan Munson
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI, USA
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
ciples about models and algorithms for change tracking and detection, versioning, collaborative editing and related topics. Multidisciplinarity and heterogeneity are key aspects of our vision: we want to look at these topics from different perspectives and we want to identify the most common issues and the peculiarities of each domain and each approach. The first edition of the workshop [1] was very successful and sparkled many discussion threads; this edition shows how these discussions have progressed during the last year. In particular, the workshop will be focused on tracking changes and interpreting them. Last year, several issues were pointed out as still unsolved, and will be discussed: interfaces do not scale very well when dealing with many changes, changes at different levels of abstraction are often not sufficiently taken into account, detection and visualization are often inter-mixed, logs are often detailed but underexploited, and versioning techniques are not very well suited for nontechnical people. Contributions on related topics (for instance, diff and merge algorithms, standardization of change models, . . . ) and from related areas (e.g., software engineering, online collaboration, . . . ) will complete the discussion.
With collaborative tools getting more and more widespread, users have started to become accustomized to features like automatic versioning of their documents or the visualization of changes made by other users. The research community, however, sees that the state of the current tools is seriously lack lusting. The second edition of the DChanges workshop focuses on these shortcomings, introducing new ways to produce version-aware documents and merge changes from multiple sources. Other aspects – in particular, the standardization of formats for tracking changes – are discussed, too. The gathering is also an occasion to follow up on the projects that were discussed or presented during DChanges 2013, and to foster new collaborations among researchers.
Categories and Subject Descriptors I.7.1 [Document and Text Processing]: Document and Text Editing—Version control; Document management
Keywords applications; change analysis and interpretation; change detection; change tracking; merging changes
1.
2.
INTRODUCTION
PROGRAM
The program reflects quite clearly the fact that DChanges 2014 continues the discussions started in the last edition of the workshop, a fact that we appreciate and regard as an initial step towards the creation of a more connected community of researchers. At the time of preparation of this summary, we have not finalized the program, yet. We plan to have four main sessions: the initial keynote given by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury, a first series of presentations on research topics, a second series of more practical talks about experiences in implementing collaborative features in word processors, and finally, a round-table discussion.
This is the second edition of DChanges. The goal of this series of events is to share ideas, common issues and prinPermission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). DocEng’14, September 16–19, 2014, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-2949-1/14/09. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2644866.2644896 .
207
During the discussion, some space will be given to the presentation and comparison of formats for tracking changes in XML and in WYSIWYG editors.
2.1
Another important theme of this year’s workshop is the use of different merging strategies to reconcile changes made at the same time by different users on the same document. Besides these topics, the usual DChanges themes are touched by the received submissions: models and algorithms for the analysis of changes, high-level tools for processing changes and user interfaces for versioned documents. In contrast to the precedent edition, the submissions received this year show that particular attention has been given to office documents and applications. This signals a welcome shift of focus: from the computer science domain (source code, UML diagrams, ontologies) to more general domains (literary documents, spreadsheets).
Invited Talk
The keynote of this year will be delivered by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury, who works at Xerox Research Centre Europe, and who is a long-time contributor to the DocEng conference series.
2.2
Research Papers
The main part of the workshop is the session devoted to the presentation and discussion of research papers. We selected four research papers that represent well the topics of DChanges and show where the research is leading. All the presented papers will be included in the proceedings of the workshop, planned to be published as a volume of the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) [2].
2.3
4.
Experiences and Progress Reports
The second series of talks will focus on more practical issues: the main topic will be the gap between theory and practice that must be crossed when implementing collaborative features in editors and word processors that are meant to be used by users. These users do not care about the intricacies of versioning and just want a simple way to understand who did what and to revert unwanted changes. The talks will highlight how wide this gap is, what has been done to close it and what still has to be done, also in the light of last year’s keynote [3].
2.4
5.
Round-Table Discussion
REFERENCES
[1] Barabucci, G., Borghoff, U. M., Di Iorio, A., and Maier, S. Document changes: modeling; detection; storing and visualization (DChanges). In ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2013, DocEng ’13, Florence, Italy, September 10-13, 2013 (2013), S. Marinai and K. Marriott, Eds., ACM, pp. 281–282. [2] Barabucci, G., Borghoff, U. M., Di Iorio, A., Maier, S., and Munson, E., Eds. DChanges 2014: Proceedings of the 2nd International workshop on Document Changes: Modeling, Detection, Storage and Visualization, Fort Collins, CO, USA, September 16, 2014 (2014), ICPS, ACM. 978-1-4503-2964-4. [3] Munson, E. V. Collaborative authoring requires advanced change management. In DChanges 2013: Proceedings of the International workshop on Document Changes: Modeling, Detection, Storage and Visualization, Florence, Italy, September 10, 2013 (2013), G. Barabucci, U. M. Borghoff, A. Di Iorio, and S. Maier, Eds., vol. 1008 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org.
The workshop will have plenty of room for discussions. The goal is twofold: fostering research collaboration and eliciting topics and suggestions for a third edition of the workshop. The round-table, in particular, will start with a topic suggested by the organizers, but ample space will be given to the ideas brought by the participants. This formula was very successful last year, generating a lively and fruitful discussion. A summary of the round-table will be published online at http://diff.cs.unibo.it/dchanges2014/roundtable/ soon after the conclusion of the workshop.
3.
PEOPLE
For the 2014 edition, the original group of organizers (Gioele Barabucci, Uwe M. Borghoff, Angelo Di Iorio and Sonja Maier) has been extended to include Ethan Munson, who was the keynote speaker for DChanges 2013. An international program committee helped the organizers getting in touch with the researchers, selecting the best submissions, and improving them. The organizers thank them all: Serge Autexier (DFKI Bremen), Boris Konev (University of Liverpool), John Lumley, Pascal Molli (Universit´e de Nantes - LINA), Sebastian R¨ onnau (Zalando AG), Wolfgang St¨ urzlinger (York University), Yannis Tzitzikas (University of Crete and FORTH-ICS), Fabio Vitali (Universit` a di Bologna), and Jean-Yves Vion-Dury (Xerox Research Centre Europe).
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The main focus of this year’s workshop are version-aware documents, i.e., documents created using formats that are able to internally store multiple revisions or a set of changes that the users have performed on them. The related problem of how to reconcile changes from multiple versions will be debated as well. The second topic that will be discussed extensively this year is change tracking. There will be multiple presentations on this topic, spanning from the discussion of models for interoperable mechanisms for change tracking to aspects related to the user interfaces that are used to show the tracked changes.
208
