[Modeling] meta-model or not meta-model that's the question?

[Renato Levy]

I will endorse the Jim,Lin and Marc-Philippe's voice. IMO going straigh to 
meta-model without even a discussion of diagrams and trying on at least a 
few examples will lead to pointless discussions. Let's agonize a little bit 
over a more concrete basis and lay down a meta-model once the ideas start 
to gel.

I like Hong's idea of a more readable format for the final document. It may 
not make sense while we are developing just the interaction diagram, but as 
we construct the AUML spec it will get more an more unreadable. I know the 
format discussion has already passed but if he can come up with a more 
readable final format then we should consider.


>Hi all,
>
>James Odell wrote:
>
> > Yes, this is a chicken-and-the-egg type of problem.  Doing a metamodel
> > without a diagram is problematic; developing a diagram without a metamodel
> > make things impractical.  So, we have started with the diagram as a 
> possible
> > way to express agent interactions.  Once we find that it provides a 
> good way
> > of communicating interactions, we then need to define the metamodel.  If we
> > start too early with the metamodel and want to make changes to the diagram,
> > then we could be creating double work.  However, we can certainly start on
> > the basic foundations of Interaction diagrams now.  The UML 2.0 
> metamodel is
> > 99.99% completed.  So, we can start by reusing some of that to see if it
> > holds up under the agent approach.  If not, we will have a *lot* of work to
> > do.  But, in any case, --IMO -- we should make sure the Interaction Diagram
> > now reflects what we want to express, before spending too much time on the
> > metamodel.
> > Anybody else have similar or differing opinions? Perhaps Paola and Hong
> > could start by moving over the AUML 2.0 metamodel to see how well it works?
>
>I totally agree with Lin and Jim, if we begin to think hard about the 
>metamodel,
>we will have headache and we won't be sure that the metamodel fits what we 
>want,
>and only diagrams will give us the result, let's continue to work on 
>interaction
>diagrams, when the diagram will be stable, we will move to metamodel. Well,
>about examples, I agree that we need that, I will add several in the 
>draft, in a
>near future I guess.
>
>Cheers,
>Marc-Philippe




Renato Levy
Principal Scientist
Intelligent Automation, Inc.
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