An entity-relationship model based conceptual framework for model driven development

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a defacto notation for model driven software development (MDSD), emphasizing on model to model refinements and transformations. However UML may not be expressive enough to describe all aspects as required by recent MDSD models. A noticeable weakness is its inability to express the ontological concepts often encountered in MDSD. In this paper, we propose an extended Entity-Relationship (ER) model called Runtime Entity-Relationship model (RER) for ontological modeling of common MDSD concepts. Different layers of the UML metamodel hierarchy are analyzed in the context of modeling the MDSD using the RER model. Modifications of the UML architecture for more precise modeling of MDSD are suggested.