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Published in:
2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Generic Meta-modelling with Concepts, Templates and Mixin Layers
Authors : Juan de Lara, Esther Guerra
Published in: Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Meta-modelling is a key technique in Model Driven Engineering, where it is used for language engineering and domain modelling. However, mainstream approaches like the OMG’s Meta-Object Facility provide little support for abstraction, modularity, reusability and extendibility of (meta-)models, behaviours and transformations.
In order to alleviate this weakness, we bring three elements of
generic programming
into meta-modelling:
concepts
,
templates
and
mixin layers
. Concepts permit an additional typing for models, enabling the definition of behaviours and transformations independently of meta-models, making specifications reusable. Templates use concepts to express requirements on their generic parameters, and are applicable to models and meta-models. Finally, we define functional layers by means of
meta-model mixins
which can extend other meta-models.
As a proof of concept we also report on
MetaDepth
, a multi-level meta-modelling framework that implements these ideas.