BIRD on Ecore

Eclipse Free BIRD Tools allows the BIRD data model to be described in the ubiquitous Ecore standard, enabling the use of the many stable open source libraries that work with the Ecore standard allowing rapid development of working prototypes using the BIRD data model.

Describing BIRD in Ecore also allows:

  • BIRD transformation rules and their tests to be described using the Ecore4Reg standard that is part of Eclipse Free BIRD Tools
Eclipse Free BIRD Tools provides translators from the published storage format of the BIRD data models into the Ecore Standard.

Ecore is the reference implementation of the OMG’s (Object Management Group) standard for model driven engineering called EMOF (Essential Meta Object Facility). EMOF can be considered as a subset of UML (allowing the description of UML class diagrams) combined with a tech-neutral way of creating and describing objects of those classes. The related CMOF (Comprehensive Meta Object Facility) is used as the meta model to describe both the complete UML and BPMN standards in their specifications from OMG.

Ecore is used for modelling within banks, RegTech firms, engineering firms (such as Thales, Siemens, Bosch) and multiple aerospace agencies such as NASA Jet Propulsion Labs.

A subset of the 40+ mature open-source libraries that work out of the box with Ecore:

  • Interactive Entity Relationship diagram editor from Ecore Tools and EMF.Cloud
  • Ecore Java API from Eclipse modelling Framework
  • Ecore Python API from PyEcore
  • Validation framework, flexible serialization framework, change notification framework, UI editor framework from the Eclipse Modeling Framework
  • Advanced visualization framework from Eclipse Sirius
  • Forward engineering and data migration from Eclipse Edapt
  • Auto-generated model documentation with EcoreDocGen
  • Flexible queries with Acceleo Query Language
  • Human readable persistence with Eclipse Xcore
  • Programmatic enrichment with Xcore + Xbase
  • Regulatory processes and tests descriptions with Ecore4Reg
  • EMF Cloud
  • Eclipse Sirius Web