Partial loading of XMI models

XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) is an OMG-standardised model exchange format, which is natively supported by the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and the majority of the modelling and model management languages and tools. Whilst XMI is widely supported, the XMI parser provided by EMF is inefficient in some cases where models are readonly (such as input models for model query, model-to-model transformation, etc) as it always requires loading the entire model into memory. In this paper we present a novel algorithm, and a prototype implementation (SmartSAX), which is capable of partially loading models persisted in XMI. SmartSAX offers improved performance, in terms of loading time and memory footprint, over the default EMF XMI parser. We describe the algorithm in detail, and present benchmarking results that demonstrate the substantial improvements of the prototype implementation over the XMI parser provided by EMF.