Foundations of Model ( Driven ) ( Reverse ) Engineering

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) received a lot of attention in the last years, both from academia and industry. However, there is still a debate on which basic concepts form the foundation of MDE. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) from the OMG does not provided clear answers to this question. This standard instead provides a complex set of interdependent technologies. This paper is the first of a series aiming at defining the foundations of MDE independently from a particular technology. A megamodel is introduced in this paper and incrementally refined in further papers from the series. This paper is devoted to a single concept, the concept of model, and to a single relation, the RepresentationOf relation. The lack of strong foundations for the MDA’ 4-layers meta-pyramid leads to a common mockery: "So, MDA is just about Egyptology?!". This paper is the pilot of the series called "From Ancient Egypt to Model Driven Engineering". The various episodes of this series show that Egyptology is actually a good model to study Model Driven Engineering.