Distributed Collaborative Model Editing Framework for Domain Specific Modeling Tools

Abstract

Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) tools have matured and became powerful over the past few years and are now used more frequently to model complex systems. Consequently, the demand for model management and collaboration among DSM tools becomes more important. In collaborative modeling, domain specific models are mostly edited and elaborated concurrently by different semi-autonomous users. Hence, there is a need for reconciliating these parallely evolved models so as to seamlessly work together. CSCW community proposes tools or techniques to ensure collaboration among general purpose modeling languages, but they do not give functionalities to support reconciliation and merging for asynchronous modification. In addition, management of communications among members of collaborative group could also help to facilitate collaboration in the group. In this paper, we propose a communication framework to manage exchanges of concurrently edited DSM models among users. Besides, we present a reconciliation framework to merge concurrently evolved DSM models.

Collaborative editing of EMF/Ecore meta-models and models: Conflict detection, reconciliation, and merging in DiCoMEF

“…This framework has a 'lost-update' problem and we argue that the final results of an automatic reconciliation process could not reflect the intention of users. So, we proposed a distributed collaborative framework called DiCoMEF in our previous work [10,11] which frees users from being dependent on a central repository. Besides, modifications are controlled by human agents (not automatic).…”

“…DiCoMEF [10,11] is a distributed collaborative model editing framework for EMF/Ecore (meta)models where each member of a group has his/her own local copy of a (meta)model (see Fig. 1).…”

“…DiCoMEF lets each member of a group have his/her own local copy of shared modeling artifacts. This paper extends our previous work [10,11] by giving the formal specification of (meta)models using set constructs. It also provides a detailed description of conflict detection and reconciliation processes.…”

“…In this paper, we present a distributed collaborative model editing framework called DiCoMEF that ensures collaboration among DSM tools [10,11]. DiCoMEF lets each member of a group have his/her own local copy of shared modeling artifacts.…”

“…These tools give an ad-hoc environment that enables method engineers to edit and manage models and/or meta-models. Most of these metaCASE tools consider the modeling process as a single user task [10,11], however, whenever complexities of a problem increase, a diversity of users that get involved in a group increases as well [12]. Hence, there is a need for model versioning tools that support collaboration among a group of users with different scopes and skills (i.e.…”