CAiSE’13

Short-bio

Tony Clark is a Professor and Head of Department in Computer Science at the University of Middlesex, London, UK. Tony was the lead developer of the XMF meta-modelling toolset and has made contributions to technologies for domain specific languages and component-based modelling

Abstract

The use of models is increasing in software engineering, especially within the MDE initiative. Models are usually communicated by visualizing them, typically using a graphical modelling language. The architecture commonly used to standardize a software engineering modelling language utilizes multiple levels despite the fact that the basic assumptions are only valid for a pair of levels. This has led several research groups to seek a means by which modelling languages can be created, and later standardized, without resorting to ‘fixes’ necessitated by the use of strict metamodelling and a
multilevel hierarchy. Here, we describe a novel single-level approach based on ‘everything is an object’, which permits effective flattening of such a
hierarchy, thus obviating all the paradoxical concerns in the literature over the last two decades.