A history of Metamodeling

In 2010 I was happy to welcome Sridhar Yyengar to give a seminar in Nantes with the following title: A (Meta)modeling Odyssey : Future of modeling, metamodeling, tools integration and the semantic web. The abstract is below (1).

Sridhar Yyengar leads the technical strategy group for Software Tools & Methods at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre and led the definition of OMG MOF and XMI standards, among many other contributions as member of the OMG Board of Directors. Sridhar has been very influential in developing the MOF vision at OMG (Meta Object Facility).

But what we need now is something much broader that the strict MOF historical vision to understand the pertinence of these reflective languages to describe metamodels, their deep goal, structure, usage, rationale and evolution. We need to revisit these metamodel description DSLs and to look carefully at their positioning towards other DSLs and GPLs.

In January 2012 I was giving a course at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo and I started looking at the history of these metamodel description languages. I will try to write down some of my notes on this blog in the future. In the meantime, I will be happy to exchange and discuss on this blog  or on Twitter or Google+ with anyone interested in the history of MOF-like languages.

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(1) Abstract: The past 15 years have seen some very interesting advances in the world of modeling, metamodeling and their use in developing tools and middleware across the complete application lifecycle. Industry modeling standards from OMG and web infrastructure standards like XML, WSDL and more recently semantic web standards like RDF and OWL have made their way into tools that cover the entire application lifecycle for both custom developed as well as packaged application implementations. As we start a new decade what can we expect in the next 10 years? This presentation will summarize the historical journey, take a snapshot of where the industry and related standards are as we begin the new decade. We will have a look at how we expect the world of the internet and semantic web will shape modeling, metamodeling and tools integration over the next decade. We will look at how emerging collaborative application lifecycle platforms like Jazz (www.jazz.net) and emerging standards like SMOF (Semantic MOF) and future versions of UML and BPMN are evolving to address the challenges of the new decade.

Bits of History (UML/MOF Alignment)

The long story of UML/MOF Alignment

The word alignment has been very often used when there are two divergent views and we need to show a consistency or a correspondence between these views. For example the business/IT alignment is often quoted as an important goal when IT platforms are rapidly changing and when business goals and global context are similarly evolving.

Alignment is related to interoperability or integration. It is particularly important when it comes to guarantee mutual consistency between two dynamically evolving views or situations. Alignment may be partial. It is a concept that is becoming quite popular in software modeling. Wikipedia defines ontology alignment as the process of determining correspondences between concepts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_alignment). The notion of model weaving in Eclipse proposed a way to compute, to represent and to enforces the abstract and declarative correspondences between two models by a specific model called the weaving model (http://wiki.eclipse.org/AMW). The AESIG OMG initiative (Architecture Ecosytem Special Interest Group) has the objective of managing the alignments between different recommendations or communities at OMG, UML and SysML or UML and BPMN for example (http://www.omgwiki.org/architecture-ecosystem).

The issue of alignment is more than a technical issue. Since it often involves two different communities, each having its specific goal and roadmap, it may be seen also as an organisational, social and human relation issue. This is why the rise of abstraction, from programming to modeling, often brings to the forefront alignment enforcement difficulties.

As an example of a situation of continuous alignment spanning now on more than fifteen years, we may look at the competition/collaboration between two modeling visions/communities at OMG, the so-called heavyweight and lightweight communities.

As a summary of previous episodes, Ed Seidewitz has nicely reported how UML 1.0/1.1 introduced stereotypes and tagged values for extension and openness, but that the notion of “profile” came later, proposed by himself and Dave Frankel in the context of the Business Object Initiative. I copy below the beginning of this proposal:

It seems clear that these guys were trying to define a new language for business modeling (a DSL for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing) but knew that they would never be allowed to draft a completely stand-alone language that could compete with UML. Very wisely they managed to present this as just a minor variant of UML, and this was not only accepted but encouraged by UML tool vendors because it could be integrated in their products and in their strategy.

Since I was just an observer and I could just attend a meeting from time to time, my reporting may be distorted. At OMG academics are not full players and are just allowed to watch the game. I was just trying to understand and explain what was going on. Digging in my old stuff, I recently found two slides that I used to explain my personal interpretation of OMG ongoing work to my students at that time. The first one shows my understanding of the evolution of modeling languages.

• Phase (a) Since UML is not only unified but “universal”, it is able to describe everything in the computer or business world. As a consequence it should also be able to describe itself.
• Phase (b) UML is mainly for code and the CWMI (Common Warehouse Metadata Interchange) for data. So we need an upper language that could describe at the same time UML and CWMI. Let’s call this upper language the MOF (Meta Object Facility).
• Phase (c) As a matter of fact the MOF may not only define UML and CWMI but also Workflow situations, software process (Process Working Group or PWG to become SPEM later), Component model, Action language, etc. This corresponds to the heavyweight language definition. When the language to define is “closer” to UML, it is possible to take a less expensive way to define it, called ligthweigth extension mode. For example if we wish to define a “UML for Business Objects” or a “UML for C++” or “UML for CORBA“.

It is clear that the lightweight definition mode is perfectly acceptable for UML tool vendors. But what about the heavyweight one? Will people need a different CASE tool to produce and edit MOF metamodels? This was a big concern. Finally there was an agreement that MOF will be allowed to fly only if MOF metamodels may be defined by UML tools. In other words, MOF and UML should be permanently aligned. As a matter of fact, MOF should be aligned with a clearly identified subset of UML .

So this lead us, about fifteen years later, in the same situation, with two different ways to define DSLs, full-fledged metamodels or UML profiles. And during these fifteen years or so, the two communities of MOF and UML orthodoxies have been obliged to maintain the strict alignment.

In retrospect it is quite interesting to analyze this situation.  We can make a number of remarks.

This has been possible under the strong supervision of the AB at OMG (Architecture Board or AB is the “police of OMG”, checking that everything is in line and politically correct).

Technically there are few examples of two different languages having been aligned for such a long period. But now we are starting to understand  why this has been possible. Of course UML and MOF have completely different purposes and semantics. It is complete nonsense to align the semantics of these two languages. The trick has been to align only the concrete syntaxes of MOF and UML. And since UML tools do nearly no semantic work, everybody was happy.

In the few situations where there were small problems, then ad-hoc situations could be found. For example in the Sun MDR/NetBeans system, an open source tool that was quite popular was the UML2MOF tool. This tool may be found as a servlet for example at: http://www.soluta.net/en/page/18/xmi2mof.php

It is funny to notice that when metamodels were mainly paper metamodels, the MOF/UML alignment posed absolutely no problem. The first difficulties emerged only with transformation languages like QVT or ATL when we needed real metamodels. This operation UML2MOF was called a promotion operation because it transformed a model into a metamodel. Later, when transformation tools improved, the need for this operation became less important and this transformation was even proposed as a standard transformation, in the ATL transformation library. It is interesting to note that the reverse operation of demotion (transforming a metamodel  into a UML model).

So, basically the language alignment between MOF and UML was possible because it was an alignment of concrete syntaxes only and the few difficult cases, a simple transformation could do the trick.

But in retrospect, this “strongly encouraged” alignment between MOF and UML had some positive impact to Model Driven Engineering. It contributed to the unification of models (instance or terminal models), metamodels and metametamodels. All these entities are abstract models, i.e. typed graphs.  And this is a noted advantage of Modelware on Grammarware.  In Grammarware, there is no such alignment on the concrete syntaxes of EBNF and Java for example.