A MOF-Based Metamodeling Environment

Abstract

The Meta Object Facility (MOF) forms one of the core standards of the Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture. It has several use-cases, including as a repository service for storing abstract models used in distributed object-oriented software development, a development environment for generating CORBA IDL, and a metamodeling language for the rapid specification, construction, and management of domain-specific technology-neutral modeling languages. This paper will focus on the use of MOF as a metamodeling language and describe our latest work on changing the MIC metamodeling environment from UML/OCL to MOF. We have implemented a functional graphical metamodeling environment based on the MOF v1.4 standard using GME and GReAT. This implementation serves as a testament to the power of formally well-defined metamodeling and metamodel-based model transformation approaches. Furthermore, our work gave us an opportunity to evaluate sevaral important features of MOF v1.4 as a metamodeling language:Completeness of MOF v1.4 for defining the abstract syntax for complex (multiple aspect) DSML-sThe Package concept for composing and reusing metamodelsFacilities for modeling the mapping between the abstract and concrete syntax of DSML-s