Change Management on Semi-Structured Documents
Normen Müller · 2010
To my parents. Executive Summary Organizations in all conceivable areas have processes to manage their business activities, often re-ferred to as business processes. In today’s competitive global economy, automation of processes with appropriate technology is advantageous. However, the paradox of processes automation is the continuous evolution and change that occurs in the documents describing and specifying the business processes. Recent analyses of the Association for Information and Image Management, the international authority on enterprise content management, indicate that our globalized infor-mation society produces, maintains, and publishes about 5 petabyte (i.e. ca. 3 trillion pages) of documents a year. Thus, an overwhelming amount of documents is produced and changed every day in nearly all areas of our every day life. Even after a decade of research in the areas of docu-ment engineering, organizations still find it challenging to manage such an evolution of business processes inscribed in collections of intentionally related and intertwined documents. Therefore, this thesis finds answers to the question of “How can heterogeneous collections of semi-structured documents be accurately and effectively maintained?”