What Is a Multi-modeling Language?

In large software projects often multiple modeling languages are used in order to cover the different domains and views of the application and the language skills of the developers appropriately. Such “multi-modeling” raises many methodological and semantical questions, ranging from semantic consistency of the models written in different sublanguages to the correctness of model transformations between the sublanguages. We provide a first formal basis for answering such questions by proposing semantically well-founded notions of a multimodeling language and of semantic correctness for model transformations. In our approach, a multi-modeling language consists of a set of sublanguages and correct model transformations between some of the sublanguages. The abstract syntax of the sublanguages is given by MOF meta-models. The semantics of a multi-modeling language is given by associating an institution, i.e., an appropriate logic, to each of its sublanguages. The correctness of model transformations is defined by semantic connections between the institutions.