Concept and pragmatics of an intuitive visualization-oriented metamodeling tool

In this article we present a metamodeling tool that is strictly oriented towards the needs of the working domain expert. The working domain expert looks for intuitive metamodeling features. In particular, these features include rich capabilities for specifying the visual appearance of models. Our research has identified an important design rationale for metamodeling tools that we call visual reification, which is the notion that metamodels are visualized the same way as their instances. Our tool supports both standard and innovative metamodeling features oriented towards the principle of visual reification. In this paper we present an unbiased discussion of the pragmatics of metamodeling tools against the background of this design rationale.