Memops Generation Machinery

A data standard is just a specification for how your data should be organized. In order to make use of it, you need a lot of computer code to store the data on disk, read them into memory, access and modify them, and check that the data are following the rules of the standard. Memops (for MEta MOdel Programming System) was created by CCPN to produce that computer code automatically for a given model. A detailed description has been published in early 2010.

The basic organization of Memops is shown above. The data model is written in UML - a computing industry standard for systems modeling - and edited by specialists in the relevant scientific domain. The Memops framework generates data access subroutine libraries (APIs) and data storage implementations automatically from the model description. Less than one per cent of the final code has to be handwritten. The applications that users actually see access all their data by calling the APIs, either directly or through wrapper.