Abstract
A metamodel describes the elements of a model, the relationships between them, and the structuring rules that constraint the model elements and the way they are arranged/related in order to respect the domain rules. That is, a metamodel provides an abstract syntax to distinguish between valid and invalid models. Although the Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) model has been extensively researched, and various extensions and enhancements have been proposed, to the best of our knowledge, a metamodel for the EER model, based on the classical notation of Chen, has not been proposed yet. That is, we have found no evidence of a metamodel that gives a precise and expressive definition of constructors and constructions needed to create, interchange or transform valid EER models. With aim of overcoming these shortcoming, in this paper we propose an expressive metamodel for EER modeling, named EER MetaModel (EERMM), which provides a novel perspective for scientific researches and industrial applications that need an EER metamodel as a starting point. As a proof of concept, we have implemented a CASE tool (EERCASE) according to our metamodel and, by exploiting this tool, we have designed an EER schema that makes use of all constructors of the EER model.
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Do Nascimento Fidalgo, R., De Souza, E.M., España, S., De Castro, J.B., Pastor, O. (2012). EERMM: A Metamodel for the Enhanced Entity-Relationship Model. In: Atzeni, P., Cheung, D., Ram, S. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7532. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34002-4_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34002-4_40
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