Requirements for repository software

A repository is a database that holds information about models, implementation artifacts, and their mappings. This paper concerns the use of a repository for database applications. A repository is a necessary prerequisite to leverage the full potential of reverse engineering. Fundamentally we need to document the correspondence of reverse-engineered models to the original database schema. In principle, we could document such a correspondence with a series of transformations. However, transformation theory is still evolving and model-to-schema mappings provide a more primitive basis to which transformations can be added.