A MOF-Based Metamodeling Environment

Matthew J. Emerson (Institute for Software Integrated Systems ISIS, Vanderbilt University, USA)

Janos Sztipanovits (Institute for Software Integrated Systems ISIS, Vanderbilt University, USA)

Ted Bapty (Institute for Software Integrated Systems ISIS, Vanderbilt University, USA)

Abstract: The Meta Object Facility (MOF) forms one of the core standards of the Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture. It has several use-cases, including as a repository service for storing abstract models used in distributed object-oriented software development, a development environment for generating CORBA IDL, and a metamodeling language for the rapid specification, construction, and management of domain-specific technology-neutral modeling languages. This paper will focus on the use of MOF as a metamodeling language and describe our latest work on changing the MIC metamodeling environment from UML/OCL to MOF. We have implemented a functional graphical metamodeling environment based on the MOF v1.4 standard using GME and GReAT. This implementation serves as a testament to the power of formally well-defined metamodeling and metamodel-based model transformation approaches. Furthermore, our work gave us an opportunity to evaluate sevaral important features of MOF v1.4 as a metamodeling language:

• Completeness of MOF v1.4 for defining the abstract syntax for complex (multiple aspect) DSML-s
• The Package concept for composing and reusing metamodels
• Facilities for modeling the mapping between the abstract and concrete syntax of DSML-s

Keywords: Model Driven Architecture, Model-Integrated Computing, graph transformations

Categories: D.2.2