Automated clustering of metamodel repositories

Over the last years, several model repositories have been proposed in response to the need of the MDE community for advanced systems supporting the reuse of modeling artifacts. Modelers can interact with MDE repositories with different intents ranging from merely repository browsing, to searching specific artifacts satisfying precise requirements. The organization and browsing facilities provided by current repositories is limited since they do not produce structured overviews of the contained artifacts, and the ategorization mechanisms (if any) are based on manual activities. When dealing with large numbers of modeling artifacts, such limitations increase the effort for managing and reusing artifacts stored in model repositories. By focusing on metamodel repositories, in this paper we propose the application of clustering techniques to automatically organize stored metamodels and to provide users with overviews of the application domains covered by the available metamodels. The approach has been implemented in the MDEForge repository.