Towards a Novel Model Versioning Approach Based on the Separation Between Linguistic and Ontological Aspects

With the increasing adoption of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) the support of distributed development and hence model versioning has become a necessity. MDE research investigations targeting (meta-)model versioning, conflict management, and model co-evolution have progressively recognized the importance of tackling the problem at higher abstraction level and a number of solving techniques have been proposed. However, in general existing mechanisms hit the wall of semantics, i.e. when not only syntax is involved in the manipulations the chances for providing precision and automation are remarkably reduced. In this paper we illustrate a novel version management proposal that leverages on the separation between linguistic and ontological aspects involved in a (meta-)modelling activity. In particular, we revisit the main versioning tasks in terms of the mentioned separation. The aim is to maximize the amount of versioning problems that can be automatically addressed while leaving the ones intertwined with domain-specific semantics to be solved separately, possibly by means of semi-automatic techniques and additional precision.