16. The storage device of claim 15 , further comprising: program instructions, stored on the storage device, to define and store differences within the second layer of abstraction between the first version and the second version of the industry model repository within a data store accessible at the second layer of abstraction.
15. A non-transitory computer-readable storage device comprising: program instructions, stored on the storage device for execution by at least one of the one or more processors via at least one of the one or more memories, to semantically search for available computing resources for a plurality of businesses conducting commerce in different industries, the available computing resources being searched using an industry model repository (IMR) architecture system comprising: (a) a first layer of abstraction comprising business specific model assets, (b) a second layer of abstraction comprising a plurality of topic maps, each of the topic maps comprising a set of topics of capturing characteristics and relationships among the business specific model assets and other topics, associations having a specific association type and association role played by a designated topic, and occurrences defining business specific instances of the business specific model assets, each of the occurrences having an occurrence type that links to a specific one of the topics and an occurrence locator indicating an accessible network location in a federated asset repository where a corresponding specific instance is stored; and (c) a third layer of abstraction comprising service oriented architecture (“SOA”) program services that utilize the topic maps of the second layer to semantically search for the business specific model assets, wherein one or more of the services of the third layer of abstraction and linkages between the topic maps of the second layer of abstraction change over time as indicated by different versions of the industry model repository (IMR) of the second layer, wherein the searching step searches the computing resources based on linkages specific to a particular one of the different versions of the industry model repository (IMR), wherein a plurality of different versions are concurrently active at runtime and are used by different ones of the plurality of different businesses to access the business specific model assets of the first layer using the SOA program services of the third layer; a first computing device executing a first SOA service available for the searching and use at a first time when a first version of the different versions of the industry model repository (IMR) is available to the first computing device and a second SOA available for the searching and use at a second, later time using a second version of the industry model repository but not available for the searching and use at the first time; a second computing device executing the second SOA service at approximately the first time when the first version of the industry model repository is available to the second computing device, the second computing device executing the second SOA service at approximately the second time; and at least one computing device of the industry model repository (IMR) enabling the first computing device to execute the first SOA service at the first time, enabling the first computing device to execute the second SOA at the second time, enabling the second computing device to execute the second SOA service at approximately the first and at approximately the second time, thereby permitting concurrent use of different versions of the industry model repository (IMR) by different devices without modification or redeployment of the industry model repository (IMR).