Towards a formalization of model conformance in Model Driven Engineering

The principle of “everything is an object” basically supported by two fundamental relationships inheritance and instantiation has helped much in driving the object technology in the direction of simplicity, generality and power of integration. Similarly in the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) today, the basic principle that “everything is a model” has many interesting properties. The two relations representation and conformance are suggested [2] to be the two basic relations in the MDE. This paper tends to support this ideas by investigating some concrete examples of the conformance relation concerning three technological spaces (TS) [10]: Abstract/Concrete Syntax TS, XML TS and Object-Oriented Modeling (OOM) TS. To go further in this direction we try to formalize this relation in the OOM TS by using the category theory – a very young and abstract but powerful branch of mathematics. The OCL language is (partially) reused in this scheme to provide a potentially useful environment supporting MDE in a very general way.