Generating versioning facilities for a design-data repository supporting cooperative applications

Nowadays the complexity of design processes, no matter which design domain (CAD, software engineering, etc.) they belong to, requires system support b y means of so-called repositories. Repositories help managing design artifa cts by offering adequate storage and manipulation services. Some of the mos t important features of a repository are version management and activity ma nagement. Versioning comprises the specification, storage, and maintenance of versioned design objects whereas activity management is responsible for cooperation control, designflow management and management of design transac tions processing versioned design objects. Regarding these issues (version and activity management) repository technology, as we think, should not onl y provide predefined services, but should be flexible enough to reflect dif ferent application needs. For that reason, we propose to provide repository managers by generic methods, i.e. by generating the corresponding function ality. In this paper, we consider a representative cooperation model, which is based on versioning services, in order to identify the major data manip ulation and activity control needs of cooperative design applications. We w ill focus on the data manipulation needs by introducing our generative appr oach for customizing versioning facilities. Additionally, we will outline o ur ideas of applying a generative approach also for the provision of tailor ed activity control services. Thus, the paper wants to show that by exploit ing generic methods and reuse as well as the extensibility properties of ne w object-relational database technology, repository managers can be flexibl y tailored to special application needs and, thereby, applications do not h ave to be forced to deal with systems only providing pre-defined services.