Using Aspect-orientation Techniques to Improve Reuse of Metamodels

Metamodelling is an activity that attracts attention of the research community dealing with the Model-Driven Development (MDD). To be reusable in different MDD approaches a metamodel should be unaware of being extended by another metamodel. This property of metamodel is called obliviousness. This paper shows that current techniques implementing metamodels do not maintain obliviousness when some elements of the extended metamodel and the elements of the original model have association relations. Three different approaches to reuse of metamodels are analyzed. One of the approaches uses traditional object-oriented techniques. Two other approaches use aspect-oriented techniques. The paper shows that the third approach, which considers relationships as first-class citizens at the implementation level by using relationship aspects, guarantees obliviousness of metamodels.