Partial evaluation in meta modeling

Abstract

Meta modeling is a well-established technique to describe the structure modeling languages. Method engineering environments utilize the technique to provide a flexible environment for defining and adapting modeling environments. We show that basing meta modeling strictly on first-order logic provides not only clean semantics but also the ability to define high-level constructs such as transitivity at the meta model, or even meta meta model level and to efficiently map the constructs to lower levels by partial evaluation. We show that it applies both to universally and existentially quantified expressions. Examples are included to demonstrate the usefulness. A full implementation is available in the ConceptBase meta modeling environment. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.