A Systematic Approach to Connectors in a Multi-level Modeling Environment

The advantage of supporting a uniform modeling approach across multiple, logical (or ontological) instantiation levels has been well documented in the literature. However, the published approaches for achieving this have focused on making it possible for classes and objects to be treated uniformly across multiple instantiation levels, but have neglected the problems involved in doing the same thing for “connectors” (i.e. concepts rendered as edges in graph based depiction of models rather than nodes). On closer examination, this turns out to be a significant problem, because without an effective strategy for modeling connectors in a uniform way, multi-level modeling as a whole is not possible. In this paper we describe the problems arising from the way in which connectors (e.g. associations, links, generalizations etc.) are currently supported in mainstream modeling languages such as the UML and why they are incompatible with multi-level modeling. We then define three fundamental connector rendering and representation principles that rectify the identified problems.