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.

Bits of History (SPEM and UML Profiles)

SPEM and the motivation for UML Profiles

As discussed in a previous post, one of the important move in the UML history was to change from Unified Method to Unified Language. Ed Seidewitz rightly suggests that the credit should probably be given to Rational (Jim Rumbaugh and Grady Booch) for this move. Remember that all this process was in the sequence of the work of the OOADTF group at OMG (Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Task Force) and that this  group was organizing a confrontation and convergence between methodologies and methodologists. The idea of a methodology-agnostic language took thus some time to mature. If this idea seems obvious today, it was not always the same in 1995.

My observation point was the attendance to some OMG meetings from time to time. I had no information from inside Rational. I understand that the RUP (Rational Unified Process) was very important but I have no idea on the origin of the project inside Rational. I imagine that Philippe Kruchten was very influential on the process, but I don’t know the dates of these contributions and influences.

Coming back to this drawing of the previous post reproduced above, I should have mentioned that this is completely abstract and artificial. The dichotomy between product and process in software modeling is conceptually well presented above but there are two  errors in the picture:

• The first one is that the name SPEM was found much later. If my memory is good, the work started with an unnamed goal, some sort of Unified Software Process Language.
• The second error in the picture was that there was never consensus on the use of a full fledged metamodel for SPEM. This is the story I want to record in this post.

The context was the continuing tension at OMG between so called lightweight and heavyweight modeling approaches, between UML strict orthodoxy and MOF deviants. The lessons of this tension could perhaps be examined today in a less passionate debate, but let us keep that for another discussion.

Of course nobody is naive and we all know the major influence of tool vendors on the definition of modeling standards and recommendations. At that time this was particularly important. After all, these companies were taking a major risk and it may seem normal to give them a major role in the definition of these standards. But it should be made clear that it was not industrial users or academics or any other categories of people that took the main decisions

The definition of SPEM was more or less made at the same period that the definition of UML profiles. The official motivation for profiles was to provide openness to the UML definition. But the real risk for providers of UML tools was to see the concurrent corporation of CAPE tools catching the market of software processes (CAPE = Computer Assisted/Aided Process Engineering). As a matter of fact, the description of the production of software (who is doing what, when, how and why?) is very similar to the process description of any other marketed goods.

In order to keep the SPEM market within the CASE scope (Computer Assisted Software Engineering, understand UML modelers), it was important that SPEM could be defined not only as a metamodel, but also as an UML profile.

This strategy worked quite well and has been more recently proposed again with BPMN. My opinion is that the profile mechanism has not been defined for conceptual reasons, but mainly for economical reasons, to protect the business of UML tool vendors and to allow them to make the heavy investments on building and maintaining their software tools.

There is now a significant literature on comparing the strict metamodeling approach and the UML profiling for defining Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).  The debate is far from being closed. I just wished here to state that the rationale for initially introducing UML profiles was an economic and industrial strategy choice made by CASE tools vendors. The SPEM metamodel is much simpler than the UML metamodel and a pure SPEM tool would have been much easier to build. But the missed revenues would have weakened the UML tool market.