Transformation of Models in(to) a Generic Metamodel

Model Management aims at developing new technologies and mechanisms to support the integration, evolution and matching of models. Such tasks are to be performed by means of a set of operators which work on models and their elements. Furthermore, model management performs these operations generically, that is, without being restricted to a particular metamodel (e.g. the relational or XML Schema metamodel). In order to allow this, a generic metamodel must be used for model representation. Operators manipulate exclusively models described in that generic language. Consequently, models represented in concrete metamodels have to be imported into the generic metamodel and vice versa. In this paper we describe how we implemented rule based Import and Export operators between concrete metamodels and our generic role based metamodel GeRoMe. In addition, the same rule based approach can be used to implement one of the main model management operators, namely ModelGen, in a generic way. This operator is used to transform models using certain constructs into models using other modeling constructs.