Reasoning about Changes of Corpus of Documents: Reasoning on Association Rules

Evaluating changes in documentation of technical products is a key issue in knowledge management. A product may be declined in different versions and one way to evaluate changes is to compare the sets of documents which describe each version. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for exhibiting changes between sets of documents. This framework is based on the representation of the sets of documents in terms of association rules and on the definition of first order predicates for reasoning with these association rules. The aim of the reasoning stage is to exhibit the differences between the sets of documents. These predicates show what rules are specific to a corpus or how differs the usage of concepts appearing in the associations rules. The framework is experimented with the comparison of two corpuses of documents which describe documentation about two different versions of a spatial component.