TemporalEMF: A Temporal MetamodelingFramework - Extended Abstract

Modeling tools and frameworks have improved drastically in the last decade due to the maturation of metamodeling concepts and techniques (Brarnbilla et al., 2017). A concern which did not yet receive enough attention is the temporal aspect of metamodels and corresponding models when it comes to to model valid time and transaction time dimensions instead of just arbitrary user-defined times (Gregersen, Jensen, 1999). lndeed, existing modeling tools provide direct access to the most current version of a model, but very limited support to inspect the model state at specific past time periods (Bill et al., 2018; Benelallam et al., 2017). This typically requires looking for a model version stored in some kind ofmodel repository roughly corresponding to that time period and using it to manually retrieve the required data. This approximate answer is not enough in scenarios that require a more precise and immediate response to temporal queries like complex collaborative co-engineering processes or runtime models (Mazak, Wimmer, 2016).