Slicing-Based Techniques for Visualizing Large Metamodels

In model-driven engineering, a model describes an aspect of a system. A model conforms to a metamodel that defines the concepts and relationships of a given domain. Metamodels are thus corner-stones of various meta-modeling activities that require a good understanding of the metamodels or parts of them. Current metamodel editing tools are based on standard visualization and navigation features, such as physical zooms. However, as soon as metamodels become larger, navigating through large metamodels becomes a tedious task that hinders their understanding. In this work, we promote the use of model slicing techniques to build visualization techniques dedicated to metamodels. We propose an approach based on model slicing, inspired from program slicing, to build interactive visualization techniques dedicated to metamodels. These techniques permit users to focus on metamodel elements of interest, which aims at improving the understand ability. This approach is implemented in a metamodel visualizer, called Explen.