Patent ID: 8280919

Claim:
A method for designing and validating object models, the method comprising: receiving, at one or more computer systems, first metadata defining a model class; receiving, at the one or more computer systems, second metadata defining a MetaClass object used to represent the model class; receiving, at the one or more computer systems, information defining the MetaClass object as the subject of one or more validation rules; generating, with one or more processors associated with the one or more computer systems, an instance of the MetaClass object; and applying, with the one or more processors associated with the one or more computer systems, one or more validation rules to the instance of the MetaClass object; wherein applying the one or more validation rules to the instance of the MetaClass object comprises: confirming automatically that semantics of the instance of the MetaClass object complies with the information defining the MetaClass object according to one or more correctness validation rules in the one or more validation rules upon instantiation of the instance of the MetaClass object in a design environment; confirming that data associated with the instance of the MetaClass object complies with the information defining the MetaClass object according to one or more completeness validation rules in the one or more validation rules in response to user input provided by a user interacting with the design environment; and applying both the one or more correctness validation rules and the one or more completeness validation rules to the instance of the MetaClass object in response to deployment of a set of objects that includes the MetaClass object.