The Level-agnostic Modeling Language: Language Specification and Tool Implementation

Since the release of the Entity-Relationship modelling language in 1976 and the UML in the early 1990's no fundamental developments in the concrete syntax of general purpose modelling languages have been made. With today's trends in model-driven technologies and the rising need for domain specific languages the weaknesses of the traditional languages become more and more obvious. Among these weaknesses are missing support for modelling multiple ontological levels or the lack of built-in Domain Specific Language development capabilities. The Level-agnostic Modeling Language (LML) was developed to address these two needs. During its development care was taken to retain the strengths of traditional languages. This thesis is based on a collection of papers about multilevel modelling. The collection starts with a paper that identifies the need for multilevel modelling through a practical example of a language used to describe computer hardware product hierarchies. A later paper examines the problems of current technologies from a more theoretical point of view and suggestions to solve the identified issues are made. The latest work in this collection defines the LML based on previously made observations. The work on the LML has now reached a maturity level which makes it worthwhile to write an LML specification 1.0 and implement a tool to give other researchers the opportunity to use this new technology. The thesis provides the specification 1.0 of the LML. Additionally, a graphical editor based on one of today's leading model driven development platforms, Eclipse, is developed