Taking the pick out of the bunch - type-safe shrinking of metamodels

Abstract

To focus only on those parts of a metamodel that are of interest for a specific task requires techniques to generate metamodel snippets. Current techniques generate strictly structure-preserving snippets, only, although restructuring would facilitate to generate less complex snippets. Therefore, we propose metamodel shrinking to enable type-safe restructuring of snippets that are generated from base metamodels. Our approach allows to shrink a selected set of metamodel elements by automatic reductions that guarantee type-safe results by design. Based on experiments with 12 different metamodels from various application domains, we demonstrate the benefits of metamodel shrinking supported by our prototypical implementation build on top of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF).