Inter-modelling: from theory to practice

We define inter-modelling as the activity of building models that describe how modelling languages should be related. This includes many common activities in Model Driven Engineering, like the specification of model-to-model transformations, the definition of model matching and model traceability constraints, the development of inter-model consistency maintainers and exogenous model management operators. Recently, we proposed a formal approach to specify the allowed and forbidden relations between two modelling languages by means of bidirectional declarative patterns. Such specifications were used to generate graph rewriting rules able to enforce the relations in (forward and backward) model-to-model transformation scenarios. In this paper we extend the usage of patterns for two further inter-modelling scenarios - model matching and model traceability - and report on an EMF-based tool implementing them. The tool allows a high-level analysis of specifications based on the theory developed so far, as well as manipulation of traces by compilation of patterns into the Epsilon Object Language.