The Collaborative Modeling Initiative explained

Modeling is a great way to increase productivity by raising the level of abstraction and creating dedicated abstractions for specific cases. Models may serve several purposes, ranging from means for communication to acting as the single input for generating the entire executable system implementation. Therefore, as one might expect, modeling is very often a collaborative activity. When projects and teams are large, concurrent modification, differencing, and merging of model versions need to be seamlessly supported. Nevertheless, the support for collaborative modeling has been – and still is – in its infancy for large-scale modeling projects. This is currently on the verge of being changed with the collaborative modeling initiative.

The collaborative modeling initiative is a joint effort in providing a high-quality open-source tool that support enabling efficient collaboration and teamwork on EMF-based models and Papyrus UML models within Eclipse. The clear focus of this initiative is shaping key technologies to provide excellent service for a large-scale industry application. In particular, these technologies are

• Model comparison and merging with EMF Compare

• Distributed model versioning support based on EGit

• Model review based on Gerrit, as well as Gerrit tooling within Eclipse

Providing high-quality tool support for collaborative modeling on a large scale requires tightly integrating several tools and systems and to improve their support for models (as opposed to code). Therefore, this initiative brings together developers and users of Papyrus, EMF Compare, EGit, and Gerrit tooling.

We are proud to be part of this initiative and bring our experience in developing tools for differencing and merging EMF models into the project.

If you are interested in this initiative, follow us on Google+, get more information on the web page or contact us for more information!

Guest Blog Post

Guest Author: Philip Langer