What is Meta-modeling?

Alright, so you have created your first webgme project and probably want to make a bit more interesting than just containing the FCO and ROOT nodes…

In a typical modeling environment (including the Design Studio you will have built up at the end of this tutorial) there will be a syntax or schema for how models can be constructed. In many tools this syntax is implied and enforced by the source code itself. But webgme, and meta-modeling tools in general, work differently. The rules for how models can be composed (structural semantics) is captured in a model itself - the meta-model.

The following definition of meta-modeling is borrowed from Wikipedia [1].

A metamodel or surrogate model is a model of a model, and metamodeling
is the process of generating such metamodels.

So a meta-model is a model that governs how other models can be composed.

Simple Containment Example

The domain, or meta-model, we are targeting in this tutorial is a domain for building electrical circuits. Two obvious concepts that comes into mind are the notions of a Circuit and a Component.

  • Circuit - A diagram where different types of electrical-components will be place and wired together.
  • Component - An abstract base type for various electrical-components such as Resistor, Ground, Inductor, etc.

Conceptually, just the notion of these two meta-types constitutes a meta-model. So far we have declared that our models can have instances of Circuit and Component, however nothing has been said about how such instances can be related to one another…

A natural way of relating electrical-circuits and electrical-components is to say that circuits can contain components. Most meta-modeling environments have the notion of containment that defines exactly this. (It is typically visualized as an edge between the two types, where the end at the container is a black diamond.)

../_images/containment_uml.png

Containment as depicted in UML

../_images/containment_webgme.png

Containment as depicted in WebGME

In the two graphical representations of containment the cardinality is also shown. For this example it says that there can be any number of Components contained inside of a Circuit.

Containment is also a strong relationship. This means that when the parent (the container) is removed from the model so are the children. This suites well for electrical-circuits - if we discard a circuit the components are discarded as well.

Model elements can be related in more ways than containment, in the next sections we will go through all the different meta concepts, meta rules, that webgme support. At this point you just need to have an idea of what meta-modeling is.

[1]This tutorial uses the hyphenated version of meta-model and not metamodel.