A multi-level modeling environment for SUM-based software engineering
Colin Atkinson, Ralph Gerbig, Christian Tunjic · 2013
Single-Underlying-Model (SUM) based software engineering environments are founded on the principle of dynamically generating all required descriptions and visualizations of software systems "on demand" from a single underlying information source rather than by storing them decentrally as separately-persisted artifacts. It is possible to implement such environments using traditional two-level modeling tools, but for them to achieve their full potential we believe they need to be built on a multi-level modeling infrastructure that can support (a) the definition of model content across arbitrary ontological classification levels, (b) the addition of new domain-specific modeling features without the need to change the linguistic meta-model and (c) flexible support for various forms of content visualization and editing in a uniform, coherent and interchangeable way. In this paper we present such a multi-level modeling infrastructure and describe its use in the construction of a prototype SUM-based software engineering environment called nAOMi.