Application Software, Domain-Specific Languages, and Language Design Assistants

While application software does the real work, domain-specific languages (DSLs) are tools to help produce it efficiently, and language design assistants in turn are meta-tools to help produce DSLs quickly. DSLs are already in wide use (HTML for web pages, Excel macros for spreadsheet applications, VHDL for hardware design, ...), but many more will be needed for both new as well as existing application domains. Language design assistants to help develop them currently exist only in the basic form of language development systems. After a quick look at domain-specific languages, and especially their relationship to application libraries, we survey existing language development systems and give an outline of future language design assistants.Comment: To be presented at SSGRR 2000, L'Aquila, Ital

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

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

Identification of Design Principles

This report identifies those design principles for a (possibly new) query and transformation language for the Web supporting inference that are considered essential. Based upon these design principles an initial strawman is selected. Scenarios for querying the Semantic Web illustrate the design principles and their reflection in the initial strawman, i.e., a first draft of the query language to be designed and implemented by the REWERSE working group I4

Prototyping the Semantics of a DSL using ASF+SDF: Link to Formal Verification of DSL Models

A formal definition of the semantics of a domain-specific language (DSL) is a key prerequisite for the verification of the correctness of models specified using such a DSL and of transformations applied to these models. For this reason, we implemented a prototype of the semantics of a DSL for the specification of systems consisting of concurrent, communicating objects. Using this prototype, models specified in the DSL can be transformed to labeled transition systems (LTS). This approach of transforming models to LTSs allows us to apply existing tools for visualization and verification to models with little or no further effort. The prototype is implemented using the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment, an IDE for the algebraic specification language ASF+SDF, which offers efficient execution of the transformation as well as the ability to read models and produce LTSs without any additional pre or post processing.Comment: In Proceedings AMMSE 2011, arXiv:1106.596