Towards a Megamodel to Model Software Evolution Through Transformations

Model Driven Engineering is a promizing approach that could lead to the emergence of a new paradigm for software evolution, namely Model Driven Software Evolution. Models, Metamodels and Transformations are the cornerstones of this approach. Combining these concepts leads to very complex structures which revealed to be very difficult to understand especially when different technological spaces are considered such as XMLWare (the technology based on XML), Grammarware and BNF, Modelware and UML, Dataware and SQL, etc. The concepts of model, metamodel and transformation are usually ill-defined in industrial standards like the MDA or XML. This paper provides a conceptual framework, called a megamodel, that aims at modelling large-scale software evolution processes. Such processes are modeled as graphs of systems linked with well-defined set of relations such as RepresentationOf (μ), ConformsTo (χ) and IsTransformedIn (τ).