Using Meta-modelling for Construction of an End-User Development Framework

A main activity in meta-design is the creation of design spaces allowing problem owners to act as system developers. Meta-design is a conceptual framework; it does not provide concrete design space solutions or engineering guidelines for constructing tools that support design spaces. This paper discusses the applicability of a model-driven engineering approach for the realization of an end-user service composition framework, in line with the conceptual meta-design framework. We report our experience of using meta-modelling techniques as supported by the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) family of tools. In our work we found that meta-models are well-suited to formalize the composition language, and the core parts of the EMF framework are useful to represent the language elements and user-made compositions both at design and runtime. Although EMF-based tools exist for creating visual editors, we found that in our case these did not map well to the visual notation we selected for our end-users.