Towards Interoperable Metamodeling Platforms: The Case of Bridging ADOxx and EMF

Metamodeling platforms are an important cornerstone for building domain-specific modeling languages in an efficient and effective way. Two prominent players in the field are ADOxx and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) which both provide rich ecosystems on modeling support and related technologies. However, until now, these two worlds live in isolation while there would be several benefits of having a bridge to exchange metamodels and models for different purposes (e.g., reuse of features and plugins that are only available on one platform, access to additional modeler and developer communities). Therefore, in this paper, we propose first steps toward establishing interoperability between ADOxx and EMF. For this, we thoroughly analyze the metamodeling concepts employed by both platforms before proposing a bridge that enables bidirectional exchange of metamodels. We evaluate the bidirectional bridge with several openly available metamodels created with ADOxx and EMF, respectively. Moreover, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the bridge by an evaluation that incorporates the instantiation and use of the metamodels on both platforms. We show that the metamodels can be exchanged without information loss and similar modeling experiences with respect to the resulting models can be achieved.