An Advanced Meta-meta Model for Visual Language Design and Tooling

How can enterprise modelling tools be designed to support rapid, flexible visual language definition without requiring programming skills or costly redevelopment cycles?

These slides accompany the paper: An Advanced Meta-meta Model for Visual Language Design and Tooling

Visual languages are central to enterprise modelling — from ArchiMate and BPMN to UML and custom domain-specific notations — but the tools that support them have a persistent problem: they are built around fixed meta models and hard-coded notations, making it difficult to adapt them for new purposes, different stakeholder groups, or evolving modelling needs. The result is a chronic mismatch between what tools offer and what practitioners actually need, compounded by the high cost and skill requirements of extending or replacing those tools.

This paper addresses the problem at its root by presenting an advanced meta-meta model — the layer that governs how concepts, relationships, properties, and visual representations are defined within a modelling environment. The model supports arbitrary meta model definition, multiple simultaneous visual languages for the same semantic model, rich property types, multi-level modelling, run-time extension without coding, and polymetric diagramming (where visual properties like size and colour reflect underlying data). It targets a property graph implementation, which offers a more natural fit for the richly interconnected structures of enterprise modelling than traditional relational or object databases. The design draws critically on two decades of experience with the EVA toolset — cataloguing what works well and what its architecture cannot support — alongside a systematic review of Eclipse EMF, MetaEdit+, XModeler, RDF/OWL, and property graph systems.

For researchers and tool builders working on the next generation of enterprise modelling environments, this paper provides both a rigorous theoretical foundation and a practically motivated design.

Originally published as a journal article by Graham McLeod in the EMISA Journal (Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures), with a companion presentation at the Models at Work stream, PoEM 2022.

Designing an Effective Graphical Modelling Language

How can visual modelling languages in enterprise architecture be designed to genuinely communicate meaning — rather than confusing or alienating the stakeholders they're meant to serve?

These slides accompany the paper: Designing Effective Visual Languages for Enterprise Modelling and a video of the presentation is available here: Design and Support of Modelling Languages for Effective Graphical Representation, Analysis and Communication

Graphical models are everywhere in enterprise architecture — yet a persistent gap exists between the effort invested in building them and the value they deliver. Models are too technical for business audiences, too homogenous to highlight what matters, or presented in formats that stakeholders simply cannot parse. When practitioners try to bridge this gap by converting rigorous models into PowerPoint slides or Word documents, they sever the connection to the underlying repository — destroying integrity, reusability, and currency in the process.

This paper presents the research programme Graham McLeod is pursuing at the University of Duisburg-Essen, supervised by Prof. Ulrich Frank, to address these problems at a foundational level. The research draws on human visual cognition, semiotics, information encoding theory, the Physics of Notations, and the emerging field of polymetric diagramming — a technique that modifies visual symbol properties such as size, colour, and shape to reflect underlying data, enabling pre-attentive processing and rapid identification of important patterns in large, complex models. The proposed contributions include extended theory for visual notation design, a meta-meta model supporting multiple visual languages over the same semantic model, and a layered tool architecture enabling runtime adaptation of models to purpose, audience, and medium.

For enterprise architects, this research points toward a future where modelling tools can produce representations genuinely suited to a CFO, a process owner, or a technical architect — from the same underlying repository, without manual translation.

Originally published as a doctoral consortium paper by Graham McLeod in the PoEM 2018 Doctoral Consortium Proceedings (CEUR-WS Vol. 2234), Vienna, Austria, 2018.