Designing Dialects of Enterprise Modeling Languages with the Profiling Technique

During the last years, several enterprise modeling languages became de-facto standards in their particular field of application. This dissemination increased the need for extending these languages in order to both specify concepts domain-specifically and integrate additional concepts. However, only the minority of enterprise modeling languages provides an extension mechanism and even those defining one, reveal some syntactical shortcomings. This issue can be also observed in the context of the well-known meta modeling language MOF and its correspondingly defined enterprise modeling languages like BPMN. This position paper therefore elaborates an adaptation of the profile mechanism from UML for generic extensions of meta models in the field of enterprise modeling. Therefore, the characteristics of profiling are abstracted to the meta meta model layer and comprehensively integrated within an framework for the integrated definition of meta models. The Stereotype concept is thereby applied to several parts of meta models including also aspects of the concrete syntax as well as semantics. The proposed framework serves as reference architecture for the derivation of meta modeling language specific implementations (e.g., Within MOF).