EMF Search

Project website at Eclipse [1]

Concept

EMF Search will provide the fundamental infrastructure and components for search queries on EMF based models. A particular focus is made on integration with the Eclipse Core Search API for end user tight integration.

EMF Search is an Ecore meta-model based extensible search engine which purpose is to provide users query launching services against Ecore based models.

Meta-model based search is basically being able to take advantage of a meta-model structure to run generic search queries onto it. This means that a meta-model structure, defining a minimal modeling "organizaton", contains information enough to get operations applied to it, and by extension having same operations applied to any inheriting model compliant with this meta-model structure. Ecore based search is in fact a particular case of meta-model based treatment, a typical approach also known as Model Driven Architecture.

In other words, this allows to develop meta-model based generic algorithms, valid across any user defined model extending elements & structure of a given meta-model. Such technics are usually employed as part of a code generation developement process also known as Model Driven Development, allowing developers to code things once, setting up templates based code generation getting its data from the particular valuation of an instance of a given meta-model (eg: An actual user defined model or domain model populated with pertinent data).