A framework for handling variants of software models

The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) envisions seamless information exchange between business partners in electronic commerce. Therefore, UN/CEFACT provides the UML Profile for Core Components for the definition of document models based on UML class diagrams. Having used this approach for three years in practice, it became evident that managing document model versions is a prerequisite for successfully utilizing Core Components. While managing software versions in the area of Software Engineering is well understood and successfully applied in industrial projects, the direct application of the same techniques for versioning models is conditionally appropriate. In this research abstract we propose to combine techniques from traditional Software Configuration Management with the concepts of reference modeling, where similar problems are addressed in a different context.