On the search for a level-agnostic modelling language

  • Authors:

  • Brian Henderson-Sellers;Tony Clark;Cesar Gonzalez-Perez

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia;Middlesex University, London, UK;Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Santiago de Compostela, Spain

  • Venue:
  • CAiSE'13 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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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.