Direwolf Model Academy: An Extensible Collaborative Modeling Framework on the Web

Conceptual modeling in Industry 4.0 scenarios enables orchestrating production processes and planning data flows. Since diverse stakeholder groups are involved, collaboration features are particularly important. Common web-based tools are available; however, they focus on either modeling or collaboration. Based on our experiences with these two aspects, we present Direwolf Model Academy, a metamodel framework for creating feature-rich modeling environments on the web. It is based on modern standards like SVG and Web Components; it uses object-oriented programming principles enabled by the latest generation of JavaScript. We already employ tool instances in the areas of user interface generation from service description languages as well as conceptual modeling with iStar 2.0. In this article, we discuss the latter implementation and present the underlying technological foundation. Our framework is available open source on https://github.com/direwolf where we welcome contributions.