Meta-Packages: Painless Domain Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages are used to provide a tailored modelling notation for a specific application domain. There are currently two main approaches to DSLs: standard notations that are tailored by adding simple properties; new notations that are designed from scratch. There are problems with both of these approaches which can be addressed by providing access to a small meta-language based on packages and classes. A meta-modelling approach based on meta-packages allows a wide range of DSLs to be defined in a standard way. The DSLs can be processed using standard object-based extension at the meta-level and existing tooling can easily be defined to adapt to the new languages. This paper introduces the concept of meta-packages and provides a simple example

Phobos: A front-end approach to extensible compilers (long version)

This paper describes a practical approach for implementing certain types of domain-specific languages with extensible compilers. Given a compiler with one or more front-end languages, we introduce the idea of a "generic" front-end that allows the syntactic and semantic specification of domain-specific languages. Phobos, our generic front-end, offers modular language specification, allowing the programmer to define new syntax and semantics incrementally

Building Domain Specific Languages for Voice Recognition Applications

This paper presents a method of implementing the voice recognition for the control of software applications. The solutions proposed are based on transforming a subset of the natural language in commands recognized by the application using a formal language defined by the means of a context free grammar. At the end of the paper is presented the modality of integration of voice recognition and of voice synthesis for the Romanian language in Windows applications.voice recognition, formal languages, context free grammars, text to speech

Supporting user-oriented analysis for multi-view domain-specific visual languages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information and Software Technology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transform the system models into formal semantic domains for verification. However, if the analysis results are not shown in a proper way to the end-user (e.g. in terms of the original language) they may become useless. In this paper we present a novel DSVL called BaVeL that facilitates the flexible annotation of verification results obtained in semantic domains to different formats, including the context of the original language. BaVeL is used in combination with a consistency framework, providing support for all steps in a verification process: acquisition of additional input data, transformation of the system models into semantic domains, verification, and flexible annotation of analysis results. The approach has been validated analytically by the cognitive dimensions framework, and empirically by its implementation and application to several DSVLs. Here we present a case study of a notation in the area of Digital Libraries, where the analysis is performed by transformations into Petri nets and a process algebra.Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and MODUWEB

On the role of domain ontologies in the design of domain-specific visual modeling langages

Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Languages should provide notations and abstractions that suitably support problem solving in well-defined application domains. From their user’s perspective, the language’s modeling primitives must be intuitive and expressive enough in capturing all intended aspects of domain conceptualizations. Over the years formal and explicit representations of domain conceptualizations have been developed as domain ontologies. In this paper, we show how the design of these languages can benefit from conceptual tools developed by the ontology engineering community