Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification

Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

Designing precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for software development

Model-driven approaches to software development involve building computerized models of software and the environment in which it is intended to operate. This thesis offers a selection of the author’s work over the last three decades that addresses the design of precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for use in model-driven software development. The primary contributions of this work are: • Syntropy: the first published object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) method to fully integrate formal and graphical modelling techniques. • The creation of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its integration into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification. • The identification of requirements and mechanisms for increasing the flexibility of the UML specification. • The design and implementation of tools for implementing graphical Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). The starting point was the author’s experience with formal specification techniques contrasted with the lack of precision of published object-oriented analysis and design methods. This led to a desire to fully integrate these two topics – formal specification and object-orientation - into a coherent discipline. The Syntropy approach, created in 1994 by this author and John Daniels, was the first published complete attempt to do this. Much of the author’s subsequent published work concerns the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML represented a welcome unification of earlier OOAD approaches, but suffered badly from inflexibility and lack of precision. A significant part of the work included in this thesis addresses the drawbacks of the UML and proposes improvements to the precision of its definition, including through the invention of Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its incorporation into the UML specification, and the consideration of UML as source material for the definition of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Several of the author’s published works in this thesis concern mechanisms for the creation of DSLs, both within a UML framework and separately

An analysis of practical lexicography: a reader (Ed. Fontenelle 2008)

Intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (Atkins and Rundell 2008), Fontenelle's book aims to bring together the most relevant papers in practical lexicography. This review article presents a critical analysis of the success thereof, both in quantitative and qualitative terms