model repositories: will they become reality?

Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienze

Università degli Studi dell’Aquiladell’Informazione e Matematica

Model Repositories:Will they become reality ?

Francesco BascianiJuri Di RoccoDavide Di RuscioAlfonso Pierantonio

Ludovico Iovino

CloudMDE2015 – 29 SEPT 2015, Ottawa, Canada

2IntroductionOver 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


3IntroductionThe 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


4Model repositories in MDEThe 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 ?


5BioModels- 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/


6CellML 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


7Drug 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/


8Drug Disease Model Resources

http://www.ddmore.eu/taxonomy/term/3


9GitHub in software developmentOver 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


10Why 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


11Model repositories in MDE – Open ChallengesTechnical 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


12

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


13Management of different kinds of modeling artifacts


14Advanced query mechanismssearch 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

MetamodelsMetamodelsMetamodelsMetamodelsMetamodelsAnalysis

MetamodelsMetamodelsEditors CodeCodeCode

generators


15Model management and analysis tools as serviceModelling 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


16Extensibility

Models

Transformations

Metamodels

Queries

Model Analisis Transformations chaining Model Comparison

Model Validation …Model Composition


17HeterogeneityEnabling the interoperability of different model management tools

- relying on different meta meta-models - belonging to different technical spaces

ATLTransformationsViatra2

Transformations

ETL Transformations GReAT Transformations

…

- Chain transformations written in different languages

- Use graph transformations to transform EMF-based models

- …


18HeterogeneityEnabling the interoperability of different model management tools

- relying on different meta meta-models - belonging to different technical spaces

save open

bpmn.io


19Scalability

Efficient persistence of large models

Efficient remote execution of model management tools

- queries, transformations, code generations, model comparison, …


20Model repositories in MDE – Open ChallengesTechnical 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


21Incentives to share modeling artifactsKeeping 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- …


22Licensing

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


23Guidelines 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


24Federation of model repositories

Public Repository 1

Private Repository 1 Private Repository n…..

Public Repository 2

Public Repository 3


25MDEForge• 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.orghttps://github.com/MDEGroup/MDEForge


26MDEForge 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.


27MDEForge 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

…


28MDEForge: 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


29

DEMO


30ConclusionsIn 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


31

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model repositories: will they become reality?

Engineering