Metamodels for Object-Role Modeling

For conceptual information analysis, the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach is arguably more suitable than Entity Relationship Modeling and the class modeling technique within the Unified Modeling Language. Although ORM has been used for three decades, and now has industrial modeling tool support, it has no official, standard metamodel. Because of its extensive capability for expressing business rules, ORM is currently being considered as a possible standard for business rules expression within the Object Management Group (OMG), and for use in ontology standards. To support these initiatives, and the interchange of ORM model data between different software tools, this paper discusses recent research by the authors to pave the way for a standard ORM metamodel. Different ways of meta-modeling ORM features are presented, design trade-offs are examined, and extensions to ORM are proposed. As proof of concept, a working prototype that is compliant with the OMG’s Meta-Object Facility is also discussed.