Self-describing Operations for Multi-level Meta-modeling

Any meta-modeling discipline, similar to programming languages, will, sooner or later, feel the need for some operational language in order to express constraints for model validation and/or action semantics for executable modeling. Multi-level meta-modeling is no exception in this regard. However, it does provide the facility to formalize the operation language within the meta-modeling framework, thus the language syntax and semantics fits perfectly well the intended need of the modeling environment. Moreover, if the modeling framework is flexible enough in the principles, the model validation can be specified and also applied to the operation language as well. In this paper, we shortly introduce such a modeling formalism, DMLA, and then describe in relative detail the design and the current realization of its operation language, DMLAScript, which enables the multi-level meta-modeling framework to effectively tackle realistic domain models.