A formalisation of deep metamodelling

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00165-014-0307-xMetamodelling is one of the pillars of model-driven engineering, used for language engineering and domain modelling. Even though metamodelling is traditionally based on a two-metalevel approach, several researchers have pointed out limitations of this solution and proposed an alternative deep (also called multi-level) approach to obtain simpler system specifications. However, this approach currently lacks a formalisation that can be used to explain fundamental concepts such as deep characterisation, double linguistic/ontological typing and linguistic extension. This paper provides such a formalisation based on the Diagram Predicate Framework, and discusses its practical realisation in the metaDepth tool.This work was partially funded by the SpanishMinistry of Economy and Competitiveness (project “Go Lite” TIN2011- 24139)