A method for the dynamic generation of virtual versions of evolving documents

Document evolution is usually performed by creating a new document which explicitly details changes to specific paragraphs inside other document content. Obtaining (virtual) document versions corresponding to its state at a specific date is left to document users, who manually extract from library collections, and compose, the pieces of text needed to obtain the desired version. But this can be a very tedious and difficult task when changes are numerous. We propose a solution to dynamically generate virtual document versions on user demand, respecting the library documents integrity. References to other documents and modification relationships can be automatically detected and are modelled as typed links -modelled with XLink- in a relationship graph. In this paper, we focus on the version generation process, consisting in a dynamic document composition based on a graph traversal. This solution has already shown its adequacy with a legislative digital library.