What do Metamodels Really Look Like

Abstract

Abstract. Model-Driven Engineering promotes the use of tailor-made modelling languages for software and systems engineering problems, with metamodels that encapsulate domain knowledge. Despite the importance of metamodelling in MDE, there is little empirical analysis of metamodels. What are the common characteristics of metamodels? Do modellers follow best practices? How do metamodels evolve over time? How does the size and structure of a metamodel affect the models that conform to it? This paper takes a first step towards answering these questions by automatically analysing the structural characteristics of a corpus of more than 500 publicly available Ecore metamodels. 1