Traceability Mappings as a Fundamental Aspect of Model Transformations

Technological importance of traceability mappings is wellknown. The paper argues that traceability mappings are also fundamental for semantics: we present a simple example showing that specifying (model-to-model) model transformations without traceability makes their semantics essentially incomplete. We also show that the traceability mapping from the transformed to the original model should correlate with a corresponding mapping from the target to the source metamodel. Moreover, the transformation can be seen as the result of execution of the metamodel mapping, and the latter thus appears as (a special encoding of) the transformation definition.