H. Kargl, M. Wimmer, M. Strommer: Measuring the Explicitness of Modeling Concepts in Metamodels, ACM/IEEE 9th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Genova, Italy, 01.10.2006 - 06.10.2006.
Metamodels represent the abstract syntax of modeling languages. However, they do not explicitly define which modeling concepts the user can use in the notation of the language. Thus, simply counting the number of classes in the metamodel is not appropriate for altering the number of modeling concepts available to the user. This paper addresses this issue with the definition of a metric for describing the ratio between the number of concepts explicitly represented by classes in the abstract syntax and the concepts available in the notation. In particular, this metric is important when bridging two modeling languages, because the hidden concepts in the abstract syntax have to be made explicit in the transformation rules.