The Level-agnostic Modeling Language: Language Specification and Tool Implementation

Since the release of the Entity-Relationship modelling language in 1976 and the UML in the early 1990's no fundamental developments in the concrete syntax of general purpose modelling languages have been made. With today's trends in model-driven technologies and the rising need for domain specific languages the weaknesses of the traditional languages become more and more obvious. Among these weaknesses are missing support for modelling multiple ontological levels or the lack of built-in Domain Specific Language development capabilities. The Level-agnostic Modeling Language (LML) was developed to address these two needs. During its development care was taken to retain the strengths of traditional languages. This thesis is based on a collection of papers about multilevel modelling. The collection starts with a paper that identifies the need for multilevel modelling through a practical example of a language used to describe computer hardware product hierarchies. A later paper examines the problems of current technologies from a more theoretical point of view and suggestions to solve the identified issues are made. The latest work in this collection defines the LML based on previously made observations. The work on the LML has now reached a maturity level which makes it worthwhile to write an LML specification 1.0 and implement a tool to give other researchers the opportunity to use this new technology. The thesis provides the specification 1.0 of the LML. Additionally, a graphical editor based on one of today's leading model driven development platforms, Eclipse, is developed

A Unified Framework for Multi-Level Modeling

With the growing importance of modeling in software engineering and knowledge engineering, and the accelerating convergence of these two disciplines through the confluence of internet-based software applications, the need for a simple, unified information modeling framework fulfilling the use cases of both communities has increased significantly over recent years. These use cases include switching seamlessly between exploratory and constructive modes of modeling, representing all objects of relevance to a system using a precise engineering-oriented notation, and applying a wide range of automated checking and reasoning services to models to enhance their quality. This thesis lays the foundation for such a framework by formalizing and extending the multi-level modeling paradigm developed by Atkinson & Kühne, building a practical prototype tool based on the widely-used Eclipse EMF toolkit. This paradigm represents the best foundation for such a framework because it can capture all objects of relevance to a system, at all levels of classification (e.g. instances, types, metatypes, metametatypes etc...), in a uniform and extensible way regardless of when and how they came into existence. Multi-level models can therefore accomodate the generation and use of information from the exploration and discovery phases of a project right through to the operation and run-time execution phases, seamlessly changing the way the information is interpreted and processed as needed. The developed framework and tool (Multi-level modeling and ontology engineering Environment, Melanie) encompasses all the typical ingredients of a model-driven development environment: a (meta) model (the Pan Level Model, PLM), a concrete syntax (The Level-agnostic Modeling Language, LML) and a formal semantics based on set theory. In addition, the framework supports the full range of model querying, checking and evolution services supported by standard software engineering and knowledge engineering tools. This includes full support for the constructive generation of instances from types and the exploratory discovery of new information based on existing model content (e.g. subsumption). To demonstrate the practical usability of the technology, the approach is applied to two well known examples from the software engineering and knowledge engineering communities -- The Pizza ontology from the Protégé documentation and the Royal & Loyal example from the OCL documentation

Forschungsbericht Universität Mannheim 2008 / 2009

Die Universität Mannheim hat seit ihrer Entstehung ein spezifisches Forschungsprofil, welches sich in ihrer Entwicklung und derz eitigen Struktur deutlich widerspiegelt. Es ist geprägt von national und international sehr anerkannten Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften und deren Vernetzung mit leistungsstarken Geisteswissenschaften, Rechtswissenschaft sowie Mathematik und Informatik. Die Universität Mannheim wird auch in Zukunft einerseits die Forschungsschwerpunkte in den Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften fördern und andererseits eine interdisziplinäre Kultur im Zusammenspiel aller Fächer der Universität anstreben

A systematic approach to connectors in a Multi-Level Modeling Environment

Abstract. The advantage of supporting a uniform modeling approach across multiple, logical (or ontological) instantiation levels has been well documented in the literature. However, the published approaches for achieving this have focused on making it possible for classes and objects to be treated uniformly across multiple instantiation levels, but have neglected the problems involved in doing the same thing for "connectors" (i.e. concepts rendered as edges in graph based depiction of models rather than nodes). On closer examination, this turns out to be a significant problem, because without an effective strategy for modeling connectors in a uniform way, multi-level modeling as a whole is not possible. In this paper we describe the problems arising from the way in which connectors (e.g. associations, links, generalizations etc.) are currently supported in mainstream modeling languages such as the UML and why they are incompatible with multi-level modeling. We then define three fundamental connector rendering and representation principles that rectify the identified problems