Composition and cloning in modeling and meta-modeling

The Generic Modeling Environment (GME) is a configurable tool suite that facilitates the rapid creation of domain-specific model-integrated program synthesis environments. There are three characteristics of the GME that make it a valuable tool for the construction of domain-specific modeling environments. First, the GME provides generic modeling primitives that assist an environment designer in the specification of new graphical modeling environments. Second, these generic primitives are specialized to create the domain-specific modeling concepts through meta-modeling. The meta-models explicitly support composition enabling the creation of composite modeling languages supporting multiple paradigms. Third, several ideas from prototype-based programming languages have been integrated with the inherent model containment hierarchy, which gives the domain expert the ability to clone graphical models. This paper explores the details of these three ideas and their implications.