Why is Metasafe called a "Repository"

There are two reasons: (1) historical and (2) to avoid the assumption that Metasafe is just another NOSQL-DBMS.

Historically: When we started with a first version (in C) we were still thinking of the system as a repository infrastructure – similar maybe to ASG Rochade. This is also the reason why we implemented Catalogs, Versions and Variants of entities right from the beginning. A powerful and state-of-the-art core is certainly important. But the accompanying tools are at least as important for such a system. The development of these tools in C was a real nightmare. This changed radically when we moved to a complete reimplementation with Java, Eclipse and model-driven development of tools. With this technology the system has outgrown the former limitations and a wide range of applications can be supported beyond metadata repositories.