Metamodelling for Software Engineering

6.1 GENERAL PHILOSOPHY AND SCOPE

ISO/IEC 24744 (known as SEMDM) [16] was developed in order to:

• (a) integrate process, product and producer aspects of methodology specification
• (b) provide methodological support in a single package (as opposed to the OMG's separate offerings of UML for product, SPEM for process and nothing for producers)
• (c) fix the double-level transmission challenges found in SPEM, i.e. to support enactment as well as process modelling
• (d) create a higher level description of method that does not require a link to UML (as SPEM does in its UML profile) but at the same time permitting SPEM-like extensions towards UML
• (e) support extensibility but avoid all the problems of the UML stereotyping mechanism (as noted, for example, in [5; 14])
• (f) align the notion of modelling and metamodelling with reality, as opposed to adopting the “artificial” restrictions imposed by strict metamodelling and the use of instance-of relationships between layers rather than a more generic representation relationship [18] (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1: Domains aligned with the various communities using the representation relationship

The international standard itself notes that it is widely applicable to “information-based domains” and can be usefully applied to any modelling technology such as objects, agents, components, etc. The metamodel can be readily extended (using supplied mechanisms) ...