Misconceptions about potency-based deep instantiation

Atkinson, Colin ; Kühne, Thomas ; Lange, Arne

DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1145/3652620.3688213
URL:	https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652620.3688213
Document Type:	Conference or workshop publication
Year of publication:	2024
Book title:	Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS Companion 2024, Linz, Austria, September 22-27, 2024
Page range:	810-817
Conference title:	MODELS '24, 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
Location of the conference venue:	Linz, Austria
Date of the conference:	22.-27.09.2024
Place of publication:	Linz
Publishing house:	ACM
ISBN:	979-8-4007-0622-6
Related URLs:	https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.11... https://conf.researchr.org/home/models-2...
Publication language:	English
Institution:	School of Business Informatics and Mathematics > Software Engineering (Atkinson 2003-)
Subject:	004 Computer science, internet
Abstract:	Multi-level modeling languages differ in their approaches for controlling the properties of model elements over multiple modeling levels. Over the years the original approach for deeply characterizing model elements, the potency-based deep instantiation mechanism, has received a number of criticisms related to its flexibility, level stability, ontological soundness, type safety, and ability to reduce accidental complexity. However, some of these criticisms are founded on misconceptions and thus cannot usefully inform multi-level modeling language designs. In this paper we identify and clarify these misconceptions in order to help guide future considerations of language feature trade-offs and design choices.