The focus of this thesis was to find, analyse, and practically investigate different commercial repository systems for the ARSENAL integration framework. ARSENAL is to integrate EO application components provided world-wide by third-party software vendors into EO application services. Both components and services are described by metadata which is kept in a common repository.

For this situation interaction scenarios were set up to analyse and define the requirements for the repository on development as well as on runtime. Those repositories selected on the basis of these requirements were integrated into an application prototype to evaluate their properties and suitability in practice.

Furthermore, several standardised or de facto standard meta-meta models were investigated for their ability to define and exchange information models.