Managing Evolution of Component Specifications Using a Federation of Repositories

When developing software components in a distributed environment, certain issues regarding the component specifications must be handled: 1. specifications need to consistently reference concrete versions of other specifications, while easy transition to refer to the new versions in either a specification or an implementation is demanded; 2. a hierarchy of description languages exists; specifications declared in additional description languages need to reference specifications already declared in preceding languages; 3. specifications are expected to evolve (potentially in multiple lines of development) while being at the same time used on other, potentially disconnected nodes; 4. a successor relation among the versions is desired. In the commo