Domain-specific languages for ecological modelling

The primary concern of an ecological modeller is to construct a model that is mathematically correct and that correctly represents the essence of a natural system. When models are published as software, it is moreover in the hope of capturing an audience who will use and appreciate the model. For that purpose, the model software must be provided with an intuitive, flexible and expressive user interface. A graphical user interface (GUI) is the commonly accepted norm but in this review we suggest, that a domain-specific language (DSL) in many cases would provide as good an interface as a GUI, or even better. We identified only 13 DSLs that have been used in ecological modelling, revealing a general ignorance of DSLs in the ecological modelling community. Moreover, most of these DSLs were not formulated for the ecological modelling domain but for the broader, generic modelling domain. We discuss how DSLs could possibly fill out a vacant niche in the dominant paradigm for ecological modelling, which is modular, object-oriented and often component-based. We conclude that ecological modelling would benefit from a wider appreciation of DSL methodology. Especially, there is a scope for new DSLs operating in the rich concepts of ecology, rather than in the bland concepts of modelling generics

Efficient Implicit Parallel Patterns for Geographic Information System

International audienceWith the data growth, the need to parallelize treatments become crucial in numerous domains. But for non-specialists it is still difficult to tackle parallelism technicalities as data distribution, communications or load balancing. For the geoscience domain we propose a solution based on implicit parallel patterns. These patterns are abstract models for a class of algorithms which can be customized and automatically transformed in a parallel execution. In this paper, we describe a pattern for stencil computation and a novel pattern dealing with computation following a pre-defined order. They are particularly used in geosciences and we illustrate them with the flow direction and the flow accumulation computations

Domain-specific languages for ecological modelling

The primary concern of an ecological modeller is to construct a model that is mathematically correct and that correctly represents the essence of a natural system. When models are published as software, it is moreover in the hope of capturing an audience who will use and appreciate the model. For that purpose, the model software must be provided with an intuitive, flexible and expressive user interface. A graphical user interface (GUI) is the commonly accepted norm but in this review we suggest, that a domain-specific language (DSL) in many cases would provide as good an interface as a GUI, or even better. We identified only 13 DSLs that have been used in ecological modelling, revealing a general ignorance of DSLs in the ecological modelling community. Moreover, most of these DSLs were not formulated for the ecological modelling domain but for the broader, generic modelling domain. We discuss how DSLs could possibly fill out a vacant niche in the dominant paradigm for ecological modelling, which is modular, object-oriented and often component-based. We conclude that ecological modelling would benefit from a wider appreciation of DSL methodology. Especially, there is a scope for new DSLs operating in the rich concepts of ecology, rather than in the bland concepts of modelling generics