 According to Ed Merks, EMF project lead, "Ecore is the defacto reference implementation of OMG's EMOF" (Essential Meta-Object Facility).Still according to Merks, EMOF was actually defined by OMG as a simplified version of the more comprehensive 'C'MOF by drawing on the experience of the successful simplification of Ecore's original implementation.Using Ecore as a foundational meta-model allows a modeler to take advantage of the entire EMF ecosystem and tooling - in as much as it's then reasonably easy to map application-level models back to Ecore.