The Level-Agnostic Modeling Language

As an alternative modeling infrastructure and paradigm, multi-level modeling addresses many of the conceptual weaknesses found in the four level modeling infrastructure that underpins traditional modeling approaches like UML and EMF. It does this by explicitly distinguishing between linguistic and ontological forms of classification and by allowing the influence of classifiers to extend over more than one level of instantiation. Multi-level modeling is consequently starting to receive attention from a growing number of research groups. However, there has never been a concrete definition of a language designed from the ground-up for the specific purpose of representing multi-level models. Some authors have informally defined the “look and feel” of such a language, but to date there has been no systematic or fully elaborated definition of its concrete syntax. In this paper we address this problem by introducing the key elements of a language, known as the Level-Agnostic Modeling Language (LML) designed to support multi-level modeling.