Re: Maintaining historical outlines

Our use case for this is like so:
"ok, this is how the law is today, and we're not quite sure how it got
to this point"
But then some X time later:
"so we found out that clauses (1), (e) and (X) were changed on March
30, 1957, and we want to know this for future reference"

I imagine that technical challenges come from a different view for your use 
case. Content management systems can eventually show differences for 
line-oriented text files easily. But I guess that you are also interested in the 
maintenance of higher level semantic data structures that are usually contained 
in outlines.

How would you like to build relationships between commit logs and changes to 
items like chapters, sections, paragraphs and sentences?

Do you need to combine several information sources to generate a document query 
and result representation you desire?

Regards,
Markus