Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 5
. An excerpt of a particular
i*
model considered as an instance of the
i*
supermetamodel
for the next version. The elements remarkably left are: links to external elements (i.e.,
from other conceptual models, e.g., UML classes), boundaries other than actors and
some types of intentional links (e.g., GRL's correlations).
5 Implementing
i*
Variants Translation
Now we face the ultimate goal of our work: given a model
m1
built as an instance of a
metamodel
M1
that represents a particular
i*
variant, how to proceed in order to ob-
tain a model
m2
built as instance of a metamodel
M2
that represents a different
i*
variant, so that the loss of information is kept to a minimum. To implement this
translation, we need an algorithm and a computational representation of the
i*
supermetamodel.
Let's start by the second point, which is simpler. As computational representation
of the metamodel we use the iStarML interchange format [17]. It was designed with
the reference model in mind but it may easily match the
i*
supermetamodel as
well. XML was chosen as interchange language, therefore we may use a broad set of
