Ontology-driven generation of multi-view modeling tools

Multi-view modeling allows viewing and modifying models at different levels of abstraction and from different viewpoints, thus circumventing drawbacks of modeling tools used in isolation. Although state-of-the-art frameworks for developing modeling tools are recently being increasingly integrated, the development of multi-view modeling tools still demands the integration of modeling artifacts expressed using various notations from different frameworks, resulting in high development effort. In order to reduce this effort, we propose to automatically derive such modeling tool artifacts from ontologies which, due to their semantically rich representation of domain knowledge, can capture the necessary information using a single notation, such as OWL. To this end, we describe a mapping from OWL to Ecore, which is tailored to building multi-view modeling tools based upon the Eclipse platform. We complement our contributions with several lessons learned while building such a multi-view modeling tool.