MoScript: A DSL for Querying and Manipulating Model Repositories

Abstract

Growing adoption of Model-Driven Engineering has hugely increased the number of modelling artefacts (models, metamodels, transformations, ...) to be managed. Therefore, development teams require appropriate tools to search and manipulate models stored in model repositories, e.g. to find and reuse models or model fragments from previous projects. Unfortunately, current approaches for model management are either ad-hoc (i.e., tied to specific types of repositories and/or models), do not support complex queries (e.g., based on the model structure and its relationship with other modelling artefacts) or do not allow the manipulation of the resulting models (e.g., inspect, transform). This hinders the probability of efficiently reusing existing models or fragments thereof. In this paper we introduce MoScript, a textual domain-specific language for model management. With MoScript, users can write scripts containing queries (based on model content, structure, relationships, and behaviour derived through on-the-fly simulation) to retrieve models from model repositories, manipulate them (e.g., by running transformations on sets of models), and store them back in the repository. MoScript relies on the megamodeling concept to provide a homogeneous model-based interface to heterogeneous repositories.