Exploring model repositories by means of megamodel-aware search operators

Great strides have been made in the development of tools and techniques for advance model management over the last decade. Despite the use of model repositories is gaining traction in industry, their use is still hampered by the limited understanding of the underlying platform semantics. Consequently, the all-important goal of reusing artefacts has led to an enduring quest for ways to search and retrieve artifacts more efficiently and accurately. Arguably, a contributory factor limiting the use of current search engines is the poor alignment between the query languages and the lattice of relations among the different and heterogeneous artifacts in the repository. In this paper, a novel approach to model search is presented. By leveraging the repository structure into megamodels, well-formed search operators have been conceived in order to permit designers to reliably explore and browse model repositories. An experimental investigation has been conducted by implementing the approach in the MDEForge platform by employing the Lucene search library.