Semantic annotation and revision control

Abstract

Software engineers and programmers will probably find themselves needing to manage multiple versions of their software. This entails, among others, managing source codes, inserting metadata tags for annotation, tracing source changes from current to previous versions, checking respective change logs, retrieving different versions of the source code, etc. The issues are more pronounced for software teams and especially those working in distributed development environments. Similar issues are observed in the case of dealing with OWL files and other enterprise systems documentation resources. It is noted that, although currently not being practiced, ontology-based annotation techniques in revision control can be influential in surmounting many of the problems associated with such issues. These issues and related new approaches on revision control are considered in this paper. We introduce a novel revision control approach based on semantic ontology annotation in distributed environments.