An Ontology-Based Metalanguage with Explicit Instantiation
Alfons Laarman · 2009
MDE (Model Driven Engineering) promotes the use of models in software development process. Models are abstractions of reality made for communication, documentation and analysis. Models are expressed in a modeling language. Every language can be represented by a model and thus can be expressed in a meta-language. The model of the meta-language is often described in the meta-language itself. This stack of models (model, modeling language and meta-language) is called the modeling architecture and is commonly found in MDE technologies. Recent research shows anomalities in traditional modeling architectures which limit the application of MDE. They observe that several common concepts we find in the modeling languages lack explicit representation. We present a meta-language which does represent these concepts as first class entities: Ontology Grounded Meta-Language (OGML). We regard language design as making ontological commitments, OGML makes these commitments explicit when expressing the traditional modeling languages in it. Currently the emphasis of OGML is on making explicit the instantiation mechanism of modeling languages. The result is a better understanding of the traditional languages and their properties, better computability of operations on models (transformations) and better interoperability in tool support. To show the benefits of OGML we conducted a case study expressing several languages in OGML. This demonstrates the relevance of the language and the degree to which our goals have been achieved.