Foundations of Meta-Pyramids: Languages vs. Metamodels – Episode II: Story of Thotus the Baboon

Abstract

Despite the recent interest for Model Driven Engineering approaches,
the so-called four-layers metamodelling architecture is subject to a
lot of debate. The relationship that exists between a model and a metamodel
is often called instanceOf, but this terminology, which comes directly from
the object oriented technology, is not appropriate for the modelling of similar
meta-pyramids in other domains. The goal of this paper is to study which are
the foundations of the meta-pyramids independently from a particular technology.
This paper is actually the second episode of the series "From Ancient
Egypt to Model Driven Engineering". In the pilot episode, the notion of megamodel
was introduced to model essential Model Driven Engineering concepts.
The notion of models was thoroughly discussed and only one association,
namely RepresentationOf was introduced. In this paper the megamodel
is extended with one fundamental relation in order to model the notion of languages
and of metamodels. It is shown how Thotus the Baboon helped
Nivizeb the priest in designing strong foundations for meta-pyramids. The
secrets of some ancient pyramids are revealed.