Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse ModelingBudapest University of Technology and Economics Department of Measurement and Information Systems

Exploring the future of Eclipse Modeling: Semantic Collaboration

Gábor Bergmann1,2, Csaba Debreceni 1,2, István Ráth1,3 and Dániel Varró1,2

1 Budapest University of Technology and Economics2 MTA-BME Lendület Research Group on Cyber-Physical Systems

3 IncQuery Labs Ltd.

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

Motivation

Growing interest in collaborative modeling

Difficult problem

o Allow a group of modeling users work together seamlessly

• Not block each other

• But minimize the impact of conflicts

o On complex modeling scenarios (e.g. Systems Engineering)

• Logical hierarchies

• File structures

o While not necessarily seeing everything

• Internal policies

• External organizational boundaries (OEMS, subcontractors, ...)

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

What’s wrong today?

Offline team support for Modeling still has gapso Usability

o Scalability

o Rigidity• Access control tied to file system structure through file-

centric legacy mechanisms (e.g. SVN ACLs, Git addons)

• Model re-fragmentation is not easy

Online collaboration (CDO, EMFStore) not always a solutiono Requires (deep) modification of modeling tools

o “Exotic” infrastructure overhead (databases)

o Does not interplay well with file-centric processes

Challenge:How to provide secureaccess for collaboration, while retainingcompatibility withtraditional VCS?

Access control aspects are interleaved

with model fragmentation policies

Access policy changes are not easy

to follow through (to say the least)

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

Fine-grained access control

o Additional access restrictions• Complementing file-based solutions

– Works together with SVN/Git ACLs

• Filtering and obfuscation

o Grant separate permissions on each• Object (class instance)

• Slot (attribute instance)

• Link (reference instance)

Our vision for access control for models

Challenge:How to identify assets inrule-based policy?

…rules may evaluatethe context of the model element viamodel queries

Challenge:How to express policy for so many assets?

…use access rules insteadof individual permissionassignment

assets

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

How model repositories work

M

V1 V2 Filtered views

Gold model

Synchronization

User A User B

Database

DB transactions

In-memory copies

CDO/EMFStore-aware tool

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

Our approach

M

V1 V2

Filtered views

Gold model

Synchronization

User A User B

VCS gold repo

VCS operations (checkout, commit, …)

Local files in working copy Your standard

tool

Server-side bidirectional model transformations (VIATRA)• Integrated via VCS hooks• Scales well to large models• New ACL

• Extends existing ACLs• Context-aware, based

on model queries

V1 V2

VCS front repos

All standard VCS features work out of the box!• Locking

• Model-aware • History• Compare/merge

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

DEMO SCREENCAST

https://youtu.be/WJZOascRMno

Semantic Collaboration for Eclipse Modeling

Conclusions New semantic collaborative modeling framework

o Semantic = ACL „understands” the contents of model fileso Distinguished paper at MODELS 2016: https://goo.gl/hYWLhb

SVN/Gito Additional flexibility (fine-grained rule-based model-aware ACL)o Security through server-side enforcemento Without changing existing modeling and VCS tools

Online collaboration on the webo RAPo Future plans: Che, others (WMF? even CDO/EMFStore is possible)

We want to bring this to Eclipse, looking for interested partiesand contributors!o Code, demos:

https://github.com/FTSRG/mondo-collab-frameworko Project proposal draft: http://goo.gl/ZndnQZ