MOF - the Meta-Object Facility

MOF - the Meta-Object Facility

This is probably the least known of the OMG standards, although I personally consider it to be the most important one. MOF is a conceptual framework for describing meta-data. Meta-data is, as the names suggests, data about data. To explain this, consider the following layers:

0. A customer, ACME Corp., has placed an order for 32 boxes of candy on the 23rd of April.
1. A customer has a name and can place zero to n orders, each order having a date and referencing a specfic item that is being sold.
2. Classes have attributes which have a type, and classes can be related to each other.
3. There are things that describe something, and there are connections between those things.

With numbers increasing, we move away from pure information (level 0) to a model layer (1), to a meta-model layer roughly resembling UML (2), to a meta-meta-model layer representing a way to describe meta-models.

MOF is mainly concerned with level 3, for which it contains a hard-coded set of "things". (If you're not confused enough already: in fact this layer is a subset of UML. Don't worry, things will hopefully become clearer soon).

So what is MOF? MOF is way to describe meta-models, which in turn describe a specific way to model something. One example of a well-known meta-model is UML. But the separation allows MOF to be independent of UML and support other meta-models as well. MOF is thus a very generic and very powerful framework for expressing model and meta data information.

Apart from being a conceptual framework, MOF also defines a CORBA IDL mapping that specifies how MOF data can be accessed from CORBA applications. With JMI, the Java Metadata Interface, the JCP has just finalized a mapping of these interfaces for the Java language.

copy from MDA from a Developer's Perspective