What does canonical mean in the context of GMF?
As stated in the tutorial “Supporting Canonical Containers”: Canonical is the terminology we use to describe a container that keeps its view of the semantic data synchronized with the semantic children. This means there is a complete view of all the semantic data which typically means a 1-1 relationship between the views and the underlying semantic objects. This behavior is necessary because in GMF there are two model layers, one for describing the notation elements on the diagram and another for the semantic model that the notation elements will reference. Please see the Programmers guide for more detailed information regarding GMF runtime architecture. Due to this two tiered model architecture there is need for management between the two layers if the user wants to see a full view of the semantic containment without having to manually create notation views for underlying semantic elements.
