EMF and Modeling Standards

2.6 EMF and Modeling Standards
EMF is often discussed together with several important modeling standards of the Object Management Group (OMG), including UML, MOF, XMI, and MDA. This section introduces these standards and describes EMF's relationships with them.

2.6.1 UML
Unified Modeling Language is the most widely used standard for describing systems in terms of object concepts. UML is very popular in the specification and design of software, most often software to be written using an object-oriented language. UML emphasizes the idea that complex systems are best described through a number of different views, as no single view can capture all aspects of such a system completely. As such, it includes several different types of model diagrams to capture usage scenarios, class structures, behaviors, and implementations.

EMF is concerned with only one aspect of UML, class modeling. This focus is in no way a rejection of UML's holistic approach. Rather, it is a starting point, based on the pragmatic realization that the task of translating the ideas that can be expressed in various UML diagrams into concrete implementations is very large and very complex.

UML was standardized by the OMG in 1997. The standard's latest version is 1.5; it is available at www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/uml.htm.

2.6.2 MOF
Meta-Object Facility (MOF) concretely defines a subset of UML for describing class modeling concepts within an object repository. As such, MOF is comparable to Ecore. However, with a focus on tool integration, rather than metadata repository management, Ecore avoids some of MOF's complexities, resulting in a widely applicable, optimized implementation.

MOF and Ecore have many similarities in their ability to specify classes and their structural and behavioral features, inheritance, packages, and reflection. They differ in the area of life cycle, data type structures, package relationships, and complex aspects of associations.

MOF was standardized in 1997, at the same time as UML. The standard, also at version 1.4, is available at www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/mof.htm.

The next versions of MOF and UML—2.0—are currently works-in-progress. Requests for proposals have been issued, with a goal of unifying the specification cores, increasing the scope, and addressing existing deficiencies. The experience of EMF has substantially influenced the current status of the working drafts, in terms the layering of the architecture and the structure of the semantic core.

2.6.3 XMI
XML Metadata Interchange is the standard that connects modeling with XML, defining a simple way to specify model objects in XML documents. An XMI document's structure closely matches that of the corresponding model, with the same names and an element hierarchy that follows the model's containment hierarchy. As a result, the relationship between a model and its XMI serialization is easy to understand.

Although XMI can be, and is by default, used as the serialization format for any EMF model, it is most appropriate for serializing models representing metadata—that is, metamodels, like Ecore itself. We refer to a core model, serialized in XMI 2.0, as "Ecore XMI" and consider an Ecore XMI (.ecore) file as the canonical form of such a model.

XMI was standardized in 1998, shortly after XML 1.0 was finalized. The XMI 2.0 specification is available at www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/xmi.htm.

2.6.4 MDA
Model Driven Architecture is an industry architecture proposed by the OMG that addresses full life-cycle application development, data, and application integration standards that work with multiple middleware languages and interchange formats. MDA unifies some of the industry best practices in software architecture, modeling, metadata management, and software transformation technologies that allow a user to develop a modeling specification once and target multiple technology implementations by using precise transformations/mappings.

EMF supports the key MDA concept of using models as input to development and integration tools: in EMF, a model is used to drive code generation and serialization for data interchange.

MDA information and key specifications are available at www.omg.org/mda.