Query-driven soft interconnection of EMF models

Model repositories based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) play a central role in the model-driven development of complex software-intensive systems by offering means to persist and manipulate models obtained from heterogeneous languages and tools. Complex EMF models can be assembled by interconnecting model fragments by hard links, i.e. regular references, where the target end points to external resources using storage-specific URIs. This approach, in certain application scenarios, may prove to be a too rigid and error prone way of interlinking models. As a flexible alternative, we propose to combine derived features of EMF models with advanced incremental model queries as means for soft interlinking of model elements  residing in different model resources. These soft links can be calculated on-demand  with graceful handling for temporarily unresolved references. In the background, the interlinks are maintained efficiently and flexibly by using incremental model queries as provided by the EMF-IncQuery framework.