A metasystem is a system that describes how to create a system.

An interesting site on computational reflection and meta-level architectures is set by the Yonezawa Laboratory of theUniversity of Tokyo. There you can find links on the Theoretical Aspects of Reflection, publications on reflection, and related links. 
One past conference with info on reflection is Reflection’96

For a more philosofical view on metasystems check the theory behind a metasystem transition, the concept ofevolution, and an introduction to complexity. An interesting site to bookmark is the Prinicipia Cybernetica Web.

Interested in architecture? J.Hamer and A. Cesta survey the current approaches and propose a new technique entitled “code incorporation” in their paper “Dynamic Architectures”. Check also the work from the Product-Line Architecture Research Group