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what level of interaction and commitment this brings, particularly because
corporate members of each are often involved in and provide contributions to
both of these organizations.
What are the best techniques for aligning standards organization activities
with reference implementation project team activities? Should members be
required to participate in both contribution areas, where applicable? What does
it really mean for the Eclipse Foundation to be a member of the OMG, and vice
versa? What role would the Foundation representative have within the context
of the OMG, and how would this person coordinate with fellow members from
the Eclipse community? What if members have competing goals? Are there new
working models that would be more productive—and perhaps have never before
explored in this context?
Specification Delivery
Specifications with defined metadata should be delivered in a serialized format,
preferably XMI. The standard RFP template requires this for new specifications,
but it has not been mandated or required for all specifications currently pub-
lished by the OMG.
Graphical notations (concrete syntax) are typically provided by drawings
and natural language descriptions. Although these are typically sufficient for
describing the elements, they are not as precise as they could be and must be
manually implemented for use in modeling tools.
The delivery of specifications in formats that are machine consumable, par-
ticularly if used as inputs to generative tooling frameworks, should be an obvi-
ous benefit to those involved in specification, implementation, and consumption
of these technologies. This includes metamodel constraints, which should be seri-
alized and interpreted by the underlying tooling. Currently, no standard way
exists for EMF to define constraints (such as OCL) or interpret constraints on
models even if they were provided.
The UML specification contains domain (abstract) syntax and semantics,
OCL constraints, and graphical (concrete) syntax, accompanied by natural lan-
guage description and mapping to the domain. It would seem reasonable for
specifications to be delivered in a manner that describes the abstract model sep-
arately from the concrete syntax and that uses a mapping definition. This
approach provides proper separation of concerns and supports the generation of
graphical editors for various domain models.
As mentioned previously, the RFP for Diagram Definition should address the
issue, which leaves the graphical notation definition issue. Should graphical nota-
tions be defined in term of a graphical definition metamodel, SVG, or another
standard?
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