Towards Model Driven Tool Interoperability: Bridging Eclipse and Microsoft Modeling Tools

Successful application of model-driven engineering approaches requires interchanging a lot of relevant data among the tool ecosystem employed by an engineering team (e.g., requirements elicitation tools, several kinds of modeling tools, reverse engineering tools, development platforms and so on). Unfortunately, this is not a trivial task. Poor tool interoperability makes data interchange a challenge even among tools with a similar scope. This paper presents a model-based solution to overcome such interoperability issues. With our approach, the internal schema/s (i.e., metamodel/s) of each tool are explicited and used as basis for solving syntactic and semantic differences between the tools. Once the corresponding metamodels are aligned, model-to-model transformations are (semi)automatically derived and executed to perform the actual data interchange. We illustrate our approach by bridging the Eclipse and Microsoft (DSL Tools and SQL Server Modeling) modeling tools.