Efficient self-versioning documents

We describe methods to produce software and multimedia documents that are self versioning-they efficiently capture changes as the document is modified, providing access to every version with extremely fine granularity. The approach uses an object based spatial indexing scheme that combines fast access with very low storage overhead. Multiple tools can extract change reports from these documents without requiring their queries to be synchronized. We describe and evaluate a working implementation of these ideas, suitable for use in software development environments, multimedia authoring systems, and non traditional databases.