This paper focuses on the version models underlying both commercial systems and research prototypes. It provides an overview and classification of different versioning paradigms. Furthermore, it defines and relates fundamental concepts such as revisions, variants, configurations, and changes. In particular, we focus on intensional versioning, i.e., construction of versions based on configuration rules. Finally,we provide an overview of systems whichhave had significant impact on the development of the SCM discipline, and classify them according to a detailed taxonomy

Version management is a key function of software configuration management (SCM). A big variety of version models has been realized in both commercial systems and research prototypes. These version models differ with respect to the objects put under version control (files, directories, entitles, objects), the organization of versions (version graphs rs. multi-dimensional version spaces), the granularity of versioning (whole software products rs. individual components), emphasis on states rs. emphasis on changes (staters. change-based versioning), rules for version selection, etc. We present UVM, a Uniform Version Model - and its support architecture - for SCM. Unlike other unification approaches such as e.g. UML for object-oriented modeling, we do not assemble all the concepts having been introduced in previous systems. Instead, we define a base model that is built on a small number of concepts. Specific version models may be expressed in terms of this base model. Our approach

Abstract 1 ⎯ Microsoft Repository is an object-oriented meta-data management facility that ships in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft SQL Server. It includes two main components: • A repository engine that implements a set of object-oriented interfaces on top of a SQL database system. A developer can use these interfaces to define information models (i.e., schemas) and manipulate instances of the models. • The Open Information Model, which is a set of information models that cover object modeling, database modeling, and component reuse. The repository system is designed to meet the persistent storage needs of software tools. Its main technical goals are: • Compatibility with Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) architecture • Extensibility by customers and independent software vendors, so they can add behavior to objects stored by the repository engine and extend information models provided by Microsoft and others. • Flexible and efficient versioning, configuration management, and checkout/checkin to support team-oriented activities. This paper describes the programming interface and implementation of the repository engine and the Open Information Model. Key words: repository, information model, versions, object-oriented database 1.

Many software applications require co-operative work support, including collaborative editing, group awareness, versioning, messaging and automated notification and coordination agents. Most approaches hard-code such facilities into applications, with fixed functionality and limited ability to reuse groupware implementations. We describe our recent work in seamlessly adding such capabilities to component-based applications via a set of collaborative work-supporting plug-in software components. We describe a variety of applications of this technique, along with descriptions of the novel architecture, user interface adaptation and implementation techniques for the collaborative work-supporting components that we have developed. We report on our experiences to date with this method of supporting collaborative work enhancement of component-based systems, and discuss the advantages of our approach over conventional techniques.

Due to increasing complexity of hardware and software systems, configuration management has been receiving more and more attention in nearly all engineering domains (e.g. electrical, mechanical, and software engineering). This observation has driven us to develop a domain-independent and adaptable configuration management model (called CoMa) for managing systems of engineering design documents. The CoMa model integrates composition hierarchies, dependencies, and versions into a coherent framework based on a sparse set of essential configuration management concepts. In order to give a clear and comprehensible specification, the CoMa model is defined in a high-level, multi--paradigm specification language (PROGRES) which combines concepts from various disciplines (database systems, knowledge-based systems, graph rewriting systems, programming languages). Finally, we also present an implementation which conforms to the formal specification and provides graphical, structure-oriented to...

Modern system development environments usually deploy the object management facilities of a so-called repository to store the documents created and maintained during system development. PCTE is the ISO and ECMA standard for a public tool interface for an open repository [23]. In this paper we present document retrieval extensions for an OQLoriented query language for PCTE. The extensions proposed cover (1) pattern matching, (2) term based document retrieval with automatically generated document description vectors, (3) the flexible definition of what is addressed as a "document" in agiven query, and (4) the integration of these facilities into a CASE tool. Whereas the integration of pattern matching facilities into query languages has been addressed by other authors before, the main contribution of our approach is the homogeneous integration of term based document retrieval and the flexible definition of documents. 1 Introduction Repository-based applications are in wide-spread use i...

This paper presents P-OQL (Pcte-Object-QueryLanguage) a domain-oriented query language for Pcte. Pcte is the ECMA standard for a public tool interface (PTI) for system development environments (SDE) and includes as one of its major components a structurally object-oriented object management system (OMS). Whereas the ECMA standardisonlyconcerned with navigational accesstotheobject base, experience shows the need for a domain-oriented query language. P-OQL reflects the whole data model of Pcte especially designed to meet the requirements of system development environments. Special features like attributed links are integrated in a homogeneous way. The language can be used as an interactive query language for the end user, but the main objective is the embedded use in applications, i.e. software development tools, via the API. The embedded use enforces an elaborated integration into the normal (navigational) access to the PcteOMS. P-OQL is not designed to substitute the navigational ac...

Development processes in chemical engineering involve many engineers who are dealing with different working areas. They use tools that produce heterogeneous documents. For instance, one engineer creates a process flow diagram (PFD) with a tool like Comos PT. Another engineer has to simulate parts of this chemical process using a simulation tool like Aspen Plus, using a document describing the simulator input and producing a document containing the simulator output. A lot of dependencies exist between the documents created in development processes. For example, the simulator input file has to be consistent to the selected part of the PFD. In current development processes, these dependencies and the resulting consistency relationships have to be handled manually by the engineers without appropriate tool support. Some tools exist that allow the generation of one document out of other documents but at each generation step the target document is overwritten, and all changes applied to it are lost. We are developing tools that explicitly model the inter-document relationships . Moreover, they work incrementally, i.e., only those parts of the target document are altered that depend on parts of the source document that were modified. In this paper we describe the resulting tools and their benefit for chemical engineering.

A repository is a shared database of information about engineered artifacts. An object-oriented repository has many of the same features as an object-oriented database: properties, relationships, and versioning. However, the two technologies are different for two reasons. First, a repository system has built-in information models, which are database schemas or object models that cover both generic and tool-specific kinds of information. Second, the features of a repository are often more functional than similar features supported by object-oriented databases. This paper is primarily a survey of the latter features, drawing attention to capabilities that distinguish repositories from object-oriented databases. 1 Introduction A repository is a shared database of information about engineered artifacts, such as software, documents, maps, information systems, and discrete manufactured components and systems (e.g., electronic circuits, airplanes, automobiles, industrial plants). Designing ...

Pervasive business requires information brokers that support customer/supplier enterprise system interactions in sensible ways. We present a summary of our model for pervasive business: a virtual database used to aggregate information from parts of multiple enterprise systems. Aggregated data is typically managed by a brokering enterprise in a high performance main-memory database. Replicated information from multiple customer and supplier enterprise systems is managed by the broker. This data is acquired and updated seamlessly by the broker's Enterprise Systems Logic^TM, using a variety of technologies to acquire the data, translate it into a canonical form and apply updates to the originating system when appropriate. We present the motivation for this novel pervasive business architecture, a review of related systems and technologies and our work to date on this project.