MDEForge

MDEForge is an extensible Web-based modeling platform specifically conceived to foster a community-based modeling repository, which underpins the development, analysis and reuse of modeling artifacts. Moreover, it enables the adoption of model management tools as software-as-a-service that can be remotely used without overwhelming the users with intricate and error-prone installation and configuration procedures.

MDEForge Platform

MDEForge platform consists of a number of services that can be used by means of both a Web access and programmatic interfaces (API) that enable their adoption as software as a service. In particular, core services are provided to enable the management of modeling artifacts, namely transformations, models, metamodels, and editors. Atop of such core services, extensions can be developed to add new functionalities.

MDEForge Users

MDEForge has been designed for:

• Developers of modeling artifacts: As previously said we envision a community of users that might want to share their tools and enable their adoption and refinement by other users. To this end the platform provides the means to add new modeling artifacts to the MDEForge repository.
• Developers of MDEForge extensions: One of the requirements we identified when we started the development of MDEForge is about the modularity and extensibility of the platform. To this end we identified a set of core services that can be used to add new functionalities by means of platform extensions. In this respect, experienced users might contribute by proposing new extensions to be included in the platform.
• End-users: A Web application enables end-users to search and use (meta)models, transformations, and editors available in the MDEForge repository. Experienced users might use the REST API to exploit the functionalities provided by the platform in a programmatic way. For instance, tool vendors might exploit the functionalities provided by their tools by exploiting some of the transformations available in the MDEForge repository.

Related publications

1. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, A Customizable Approach for the Automated Quality Assessment of Modelling Artefacts, in: 10th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2016), Lisbon, Portugal, IEEE CPS, 2016
2. Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Alfonso Pierantonio, Jesus Sanchez Cuadrado, Juan De Lara and Esther Guerra, Using ATL transformation services in the MDEForge collaborative modeling platform, in: 9th International Conference on Model Transformation (ICMT2016), Vienna (Austria), 2016
3. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Automated Clustering of Metamodel Repositories, in: 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'16), 2016
4. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, A Tool for Clustering Metamodel Repositories, in: Demonstrations and Posters at MODELS2015, Ottawa, Canada, 2015
5. Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Collaborative Repositories in Model-Driven Engineering (2015), in: IEEE Software, 32:3(28-34)
6. Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Mining Correlations of ATL Model Transformation and Metamodel Metrics, in: ICSE 2015 Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (MiSE 2015), Florence (Italy), 2015
7. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Model Repositories: Will they become reality ?, in: CloudMDE Workshop at MoDELS 2015, Ottawa, Canada, 2015
8. Francesco Basciani, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Automated Chaining of Model Transformations with Incompatible Metamodels, in: Procs. International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2014), Valencia (Spain), pages 602-618, Springer International Publishing, 2014
9. Francesco Basciani, Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Amleto Di Salle, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, MDEForge: an extensible Web-based modeling platform, in: CloudMDE Workshop at MoDELS 2014, Valencia, Spain, http://ceur-ws.org/, 2014
10. Juri Di Rocco, Davide Di Ruscio, Ludovico Iovino and Alfonso Pierantonio, Mining metrics for understanding metamodel characteristics, in: ICSE 2014 Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering (MiSE 2014), Hyderabad, India, 2014

MDEForge at work

A video showing MDEForge at work is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bplcJlmoJuA The video is about the use of services, which have been added to MDEForge for executing and analyzing ATL transformations.