Model Differences in the Eclipse Modeling Framework

Increasingly, recording the various kinds of design-level structural evolution that a system undergoes throughout its entire life-cycle is gaining a fundamental importance and cannot be neglected in software modeling and development. In this respect, an interesting and useful operation between the designs of subsequent system versions is the difference management consisting in calculation, representation, and visualization. This work presents EMF Compare, an approach to model difference calculation and representation for the EMF (Eclipse Modelling Framework). Apart from enhancing the rank of model differences to that of first-class artifacts according to the "everything is a model" principle, the approach presents several properties which are discussed according to a conceptual framework.