A Graph-Based Framework for Rapid Construction of Document Integration Tools

In development processes, multiple tools are used to describe different aspects of the product to be developed. Resulting information is stored in heterogeneous documents that are technically independent but whose contents are closely related on the semantic level. Thus, if one document is changed, these changes have to be propagated to dependent documents in order to restore mutual consistency. There is a need for integration tools which assist developers with consistency maintenance, because this is error-prone work if done manually due to complex and big documents. Due to the nature of development processes, these tools have to work incrementally and bidirectionally, and have to support user interaction. Driven by this need, we developed an approach for the realization of such tools which is currently being used in the chemical engineering domain. The core idea of the approach is to define graph-based rules that control change propagation. In (Becker et al, 2002) we gave an overview of the overall approach and in (Becker et al, 2003) we introduced the underlying rule models. The rule execution formalism is described in (Becker et al, 2004). In this paper, we present the architecture and the implementation of a framework realizing the approach and outline how the approach is going to be transferred into practice together with an industrial partner from the chemical engineering domain.