institut f¨ur informatik - PST Thesis Management Interface - LMU

2.2. Eclipse Modeling Framework
In the following, some key aspects of the Ecore metamodel (see figure 2.5) will be described.
• An groups related classes together in a package. Thus, EPackages are useful
for structuring large models. When an Ecore model is serialized, the root element
represents a package.
• An models classes themselves. Classes are identified by name and can have a
number of structural features, such as attributes and references. In order to support
inheritance, a class can refer to one or more other classes as its supertypes. Abstraction
is supported through respective EClass properties.
• An is the common base class for EAttributes and EReferences.
Both have a name and a type. EStructuralFeatures represent the components of
an object’s data. They also define the state of an instance of the EClass they are
contained in. Besides name and type, EStructuralFeatures have various properties
that define them closely, such as upper and lower bounds, mutability, uniqueness etc.
• An models the behavioral features of a class only by specifying interfaces
to the operations (an actual behavior implementation can be supplemented through
annotations).
Figure 2.5.: An excerpt from the Ecore metamodel (image adopted from [Ste08]).
EOperation is not displayed in this image.
The structure of a domain model can be defined as an Ecore diagram (in an editor that
is shipped with EMF, see figure 2.6), as XML or XML Schema Definition, as UML and
as annotated Java. In each case EMF creates the corresponding Ecore model, which can
then be used to automatically create model representations in all the other forms as well.
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