Intuitive Visualization-Oriented Metamodeling

In this article we present a metamodeling tool that is strictly oriented towards the needs of the working domain expert. The working domain expert longs for intuitive metamodeling features. In particular this concerns rich capabilities for specifying the visual appearance of models. In these efforts we have identified an important design rationale for metamodeling tools that we call visual reification – the notion that metamodels are visualized the same way as their instances. In our tool we support both, standard metamodeling features and new metamodeling features that are oriented towards the visual reification principle. We will start an unbiased discussion of the pragmatics of metamodeling tools against the background of this design rationale.