Coping with Semantic Variation Points in Domain-Specific Modeling Languages

International audienceEven if they exhibit differences, many Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) share elements from their concepts, notations and semantics. StateCharts is a well known family of DSMLs that share many concepts but exhibit notational differences and many execution semantics variants (called Semantic Variation Points – SVPs –). For instance, when two conflicting transitions in a state machine are enabled by the same event occurrence, which transition is fired depends on the language variant (Harel original StateCharts, UML, Rhapsody, etc.) supported by the execution tool. Tools usually provide only one implementation of SVPs. It complicates communication both between tools and end-users, and hinders the co-existence of multiple variants. More generally, Language Workbenches dedicated to the specification and implementation of eXecutable Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (xDSMLs) often do not offer the tools and facilities to manage these SVPs, making it a time-consuming and troublesome activity. In this paper, we describe a modularized approach to the operational execution semantics of xDSMLs and show how it allows us to manage SVPs. We illustrate this proposal on StateCharts

Terminology mining in social media

The highly variable and dynamic word usage in social media presents serious challenges for both research and those commercial applications that are geared towards blogs or other user-generated non-editorial texts. This paper discusses and exemplifies a terminology mining approach for dealing with the productive character of the textual environment in social media. We explore the challenges of practically acquiring new terminology, and of modeling similarity and relatedness of terms from observing realistic amounts of data. We also discuss semantic evolution and density, and investigate novel measures for characterizing the preconditions for terminology mining

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Modelling and Managing Variability in Business Process Models

Business Process (BP) models capture the coordination of a set of activities whose execution realizes specific business goals within a company. However, the construction of such models entails a big challenge for modellers and strongly depends on the nature of the domain being modelled. Moreover, when this nature involves handling many process alternatives, the use of variability modelling mechanisms becomes essential to succeed in the BP modelling task. Even though BP modelling variability has already been addressed by researches from the BPM community, it still remains as a challenge that is requested as hot topic in the most relevant conferences related to the BP area (i.e. the international conference on Business Process Modeling (BPM), CoopIS or BPDSM). This demand appears since the solutions provided in the literature do not deal with variability in a broad sense (considering all types of variability that we can find in a BP model), and in a scalable manner. In this context, this work provides a modelling approach that brings variability concepts as first order aspects of the modelling process. Concretely, the approach isolates the variability factors that affect a BP and allows managing independently their impact over the whole model. For such purpose, we rely on the techniques proposed in the field of the Software Product Lines to deal with variability issues. These techniques allows enhancing variability expressiveness as well as promoting model maintenance, legibility, understanding and reuse regarding variability. Finally, a running example is described and developed to illustrate the proposal and its applicability.Ayora Esteras, C. (2011). Modelling and Managing Variability in Business Process Models. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/15495Archivo delegad

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow