A meta-modelling approach to express change requirements

Organisations have to evolve frequently in order to remain competitive and to take into account changes in their environment. We develop a co-evolution approach to jointly make evolve the information system and the business processes. This approach relies on an explicit specification of change requirements defined with operators expressing gaps between the As-Is and the To-Be situations. However, such gaps based approach can also be used in an other evolution context, when a database or a workflow model evolves. Thus, instead of specifying new operators associated to the Map meta-model used in this co-evolution approach, we propose to define a generic typology of gaps to facilitate a precise definition of change requirements under the form of gaps. The paper presents the approach to generate a gap typology and illustrates it with the Map meta-model.