A tool for clustering metamodel repositories

Over the last years, several model repositories have been proposed in response to the need of the MDE community for advanced systems supporting the reuse of modeling artifacts. Modelers can interact with MDE repositories with different intents ranging from merely repository browsing, to searching specific artifacts satisfying precise requirements. The organization and browsing facilities provided by current repositories is limited since they do not produce structured overviews of the contained artifacts, and the categorization mechanisms (if any) are based on manual activities. When dealing with large numbers of modeling artifacts, such limitations increase the effort related to both managing and reusing artifacts stored in model repositories. By focusing on metamodels management, in this paper we propose a clustering tool for automatically organizing stored metamodels and provide users with repository overviews as, for instance, the application domains covered by the available metamodels. The approach has been implemented and integrated in the MDEForge repository1.