Calling a Spade a Spade in the MDA Infrastructure
Colin Atkinson, Thomas Kühne · 2003
Metamodeling has a pivotal role to play in the realization of the MDA. It is therefore essential that the MDA community establish a clear and sound view of what metamodels are, what purposes they serve, and what form they consequently should take. A lot of progress has been made in this direction in recent years, but there are still some fundamental issues that need to be sorted out. In our view, one of the most fundamental problems is that the role of metamodeling in the MDA approach is generally looked at from one angle only. The “accepted wisdom” at the moment is that the role of metamodeling is to support language definition and/or extension. This “metamodeling is language definition” view is found in the preambles to many of the UML/MOF related OMG documents, and is even implicit in this workshop’s Call for Papers. We do not challenge the fact that one of the most important functions of metamodeling in MDA is to support the definition of languages. However, we believe that characterizing language definition as the only role of metamodeling is overly simplistic and ultimately detrimental to the evolution of MDA technology. To do justice to metamodeling and properly characterize its role we need to go back to the foundations of “modeling” and “meta-ness” and analyze what their integration means.