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Genericity for model management operations

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Abstract

Models are the core assets in model-driven engineering, and are therefore subject to all kind of manipulations, such as refactorings, animations, transformations into other languages, comparisons and merging. This set of model-related activities is known as model management. Even though many languages and approaches have been proposed for model management, most of them are type-centric, specific to concrete meta-models, and hence leading to specifications with a low level of abstraction and difficult to be reused in practice. In this paper, we introduce ideas from generic programming into model management to raise the level of abstraction of the specifications of model manipulations and facilitate their reuse. In particular we adopt generic meta-model concepts as an intermediate, abstract meta-model over which model management specifications are defined. Such meta-model concepts are mapped to concrete meta-models, so that specifications can be applied to families of meta-models satisfying the concept requirements. As a proof of concept, we show the implementation of these ideas using the Eclipse Modeling Framework and the Epsilon family of languages for model management.

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Author notes

  1. Louis Rose

    Present address: Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of York, York, UK

    Louis Rose, Dimitris Kolovos & Richard Paige

  2. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Esther Guerra & Juan de Lara

  3. INRIA Lille Nord Europe, Université Lille 1, Lille, France

    Anne Etien

Authors
  1. Louis Rose
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  2. Esther Guerra
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  3. Juan de Lara
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  4. Anne Etien
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  5. Dimitris Kolovos
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  6. Richard Paige
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Juan de Lara.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Gabor Karsai.

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Rose, L., Guerra, E., de Lara, J. et al. Genericity for model management operations. Softw Syst Model 12, 201–219 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-011-0203-2

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