Slides of my talk at CloudMDE workshop @ MODELS 2015 - Ottawa, Canada

1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienze
Università degli Studi dell’Aquila
dell’Informazione e Matematica
Model Repositories:
Will they become reality ?
Francesco Basciani
Juri Di Rocco
Davide Di Ruscio
Alfonso Pierantonio
Ludovico Iovino

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Introduction
Over the last decades many MDE technologies have
been conceived to support a wide range of modeling
and model management activities
An increasing demand for:
- flexible support to develop and (re)use model
management tools
- tools enabling collaborative development of modeling
artifacts
- reusable modeling artifacts for benchmarking and
learning purposes

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Introduction
The current support for discovering and reusing
already developed modeling artifacts is very limited
The upfront investment in adopting MDE is raised
and the productivity benefits of model-based
processes are compromised

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Model repositories in MDE
The benefits related to the adoption of model
repositories have been acknowledged in the MDE
community
In the past decade several model repositories have
been introduced
All of them seem to struggle in
attracting contributions from the
community
Why ?
What happens in other domains ?

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BioModels
- Repository of
computational
models of
biological
processes
- 200K models
collected from
literature and
manually
enriched with
cross-
references
(publications,
ontologies,
etc.)
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels-main/

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CellML model repository
– More than 550
mathematical
models of cellular
biological functions
– Based on the
CellML language
• XML-based open
standard
http://models.cellml.org/cellml

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Drug Disease Model Resources
- Platform for sharing
computational
models describing
the interactions
between drugs and
patients
- Pharmacometrics
Markup Language
(PharmML) at its
core
- Available as a
public instance
- It is also possible to
integrate private or
customized
versions within
organization
http://www.ddmore.eu/

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Drug Disease Model Resources
http://www.ddmore.eu/taxonomy/term/3

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GitHub in software development
Over 25.3 million repositories hosted
Powerful tools (e.g., collaborative code review,
intelligent issue tracking, powerful search, and useful
analytics) are provided
It supports the development of software systems,
which can be both open to the community or private

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Why some repositories are already reality ?
The popularity of such repositories has been gained
thank to the opportunities offered to their users
They make easier for researchers to share and reuse
a variety of models developed to describe drug
action, disease progression and more
Nobody would be interested in sharing artifacts
without envisioning an added value in doing so

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Model repositories in MDE – Open Challenges
Technical challenges
- Management of different kinds of modeling artifacts
- Advanced query mechanisms
- Model management and analysis tools as service
- Extensibility
- Heterogeneity
- Scalability
Non technical challenges
- Incentives to share modeling artifacts
- Licensing of the shared artifacts
- Guidelines for sharing artifacts and assess their quality
- Federation of model repositories

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Explicit management of relations
- conformTo, domainConformTo, similarity, difference,
evaluatedOn…
Megamodel representing and organizing the content of
the repository
Management of different kinds of modeling
artifacts
Models
Transformations
Metamodels
Queries

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Management of different kinds of
modeling artifacts

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Advanced query mechanisms
search metamodels that permit to specify behavioural models that
can be analysed (e.g. deadlock-freeness) and transformed by
stored transformations to C code and that can be edited by both
graphical and textual available editors
MetamodelsMetamodelsMetamodels
MetamodelsMetamodelsAnalysis
MetamodelsMetamodelsEditors CodeCode
Code
generators

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Model management and analysis tools as service
Modelling and model management tools are
distributed as software packages to be locally
installed
- burden particularly for non-technical stakeholders (e.g., domain
experts) with average IT skills
Cloud-based installations of model repositories to
enable the remote adoption of tools
- APIs to programmatically adopt already available model
management and analysis tools
- Increased tools integration possibilities

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Extensibility
Models
Transformations
Metamodels
Queries
Model Analisis
Transformations
chaining
Model Comparison
Model Validation …
Model
Composition

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Heterogeneity
Enabling the interoperability of different model
management tools
- relying on different meta meta-models
- belonging to different technical spaces
ATLTransformations
Viatra2
Transformations
ETL Transformations
GReAT
Transformations
…
- Chain transformations written in
different languages
- Use graph transformations to
transform EMF-based models
- …

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Heterogeneity
Enabling the interoperability of different model
management tools
- relying on different meta meta-models
- belonging to different technical spaces
bpmn.io

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Scalability
Efficient persistence of large models
Efficient remote execution of model management
tools
- queries, transformations, code generations, model
comparison, …

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Model repositories in MDE – Open Challenges
Technical challenges
- Management of different kinds of modeling artifacts
- Advanced query mechanisms
- Model management and analysis tools as service
- Extensibility
- Heterogeneity
- Scalability
Non technical challenges
- Incentives to share modeling artifacts
- Licensing of the shared artifacts
- Guidelines for sharing artifacts and assess their quality
- Federation of model repositories

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Incentives to share modeling artifacts
Keeping repositories alive and solicit contributions from user
communities is a hard task
Business entities might not see any benefit of sharing artifacts
Need for rewarding mechanisms motivating users to share artifacts
Availability of additional services
- remote validation of modeling artifacts
- automated chaining of model transformations and their remote
execution
- code generation as service
- …

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Licensing
Need for licensing schemes under which modeling
artifacts are uploaded and maintained in model
repositories

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Guidelines for sharing artifacts and asses
their quality
It is necessary to agree how to upload and share
artifacts
- which format ?
- what metadata ?
Artifact sharing has to be moderated
- shared artifacts have to be analyzed and tested before
making them publicly available
- similarly to what happens in app stores

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Federation of model repositories
Public Repository 1
Private Repository 1 Private Repository n…..
Public Repository 2
Public Repository 3

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MDEForge
• Community-based repository of modeling artifacts
• It enables the adoption of model management
tools as software as a service
• It is modular and extensible
• It supports advanced mechanisms to browse and
query the repository
http://www.mdeforge.org
https://github.com/MDEGroup/MDEForge

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MDEForge users
• Developers of modeling artifacts: communities
of users that might want to share their tools and
enable their adoption and refinement by other
users
• Developers of MDEForge extensions:
experienced users might contribute by proposing
new extensions to be included in the platform
• End-users: By means of the Web access and the
REST API the platform enables end-users to
search and use (meta)models, transformations,
share artifacts, etc.

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MDEForge architecture
save open
bpmn.io
transform
Core
Repository
WEB
Access
REST API
ModelTransformation Metamodel
Extensions
Metrics
Calculator
Transformation
chain
Users
Clustering
Visualizer
Proximity
Calculator
Clustering
Creator
…

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MDEForge: main features
- Repository of modeling artifacts
- Artifacts can be public or private
- Sharing mechanism (Dropbox-like)
- Management of workspaces and projects
- Mechanisms to aggregate modeling artifacts
- Model management as service
- Execution of model transformations
- ATL, ETL, Acceleo, more will come
- Metamodel comparison
- Metamodel clustering
- Model Search (by example)
- Accessible via REST API and Web application

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DEMO

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Conclusions
In different application domains model repositories
are already reality
- they are continuously used to share, learn, reuse, and
improve artifacts
The real adoption of model repositories in MDE is still
at early stages
A research agenda including technical and non
technical issues has been drawn

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