Establishing Interoperability Between the EMF and the MSDKVS Metamodeling Platforms

Abstract

Many powerful metamodeling platforms exist, each with strengths, weaknesses, functionalities, programming language(s), and developer community. To exploit the mutual benefits of these platforms, it would be ideal to establish interoperability amongst them and the exchange of metamodels and models. This would enable language engineers to choose the metamodeling platform freely without risking a lock-in effect. Two well-documented and freely available metamodeling platforms are the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Microsoft’s Modeling SDK for Visual Studio (MSDKVS). This paper proposes the first achievements toward establishing interoperability between EMF and MSDKVS on an abstract syntax level and a graphical concrete syntax level. To develop such interoperability, we i) comprehensively analyze the two platforms, ii) present a conceptual mapping between them, and iii) eventually implement a bidirectional transformation bridge. The transformed results’ validity, executability, and expressiveness are then quantitatively and qualitatively assessed by transforming a collection of publicly available metamodels.