Elen Prototype: an Active Hypertext System for Document Management in Software Engineering

In this paper we present the Elen prototype objective of which is to support maintenance activities for large software systems. We take advantage of hypertext systems in order to manage links between objects (programs and documentation) and to support navigation and interface features. To overcome hypertext insufficiency in supporting structural and dynamic aspects of software engineering documents, we define a new underlying data model. The proposed data model is object-oriented, it provides the hypertext by the abstraction mechanisms necessary to model structural documents and semantics of composition links between them. With this model the “nodes” of the hypertext becomes active, in the sense that, some actions can be executed on nodes of a given type, and side effects of modifications are propagated to other nodes which may react. These later aspects are supported at the data model level using methods which constitute triggers associated to objects. This paper is focused on the presentation of dynamic aspects of the model and on the Elen prototype implementing the model features.