Bidirectional Transformation "bx" (Dagstuhl Seminar 11031)

Bidirectional transformations bx are a mechanism for maintaining the consistency of two (or more) related sources of information. Researchers from many different areas of computer science including databases (DB), graph transformations (GT), software engineering (SE), and programming languages (PL) are actively investigating the use of bx to solve a diverse set of problems. Although researchers have been actively working on bidirectional transformations in the above mentioned communities for many years already, there has been very little cross-discipline interaction and cooperation so far. The purpose of a first International Meeting on Bidirectional Transformations (GRACE-BX), held in December 2008 near Tokyo, was therefore to bring together international elites, promising young researchers, and leading practitioners to share problems, discuss solutions, and open a dialogue towards understanding the common underpinnings of bx in all these areas. While the GRACE-BX meeting provided a starting point for exchanging ideas in different communities and confirmed our believe that there is a considerable overlap of studied problems and developed solutions in the identified communities, the Dagstuhl Seminar 11031 on ``Bidirectional Transformations\u27\u27 also aimed at providing a place for working together to define a common vocabulary of terms and desirable properties of bidirectional transformations, develop a suite of benchmarks, solve some challenging problems, and launch joint efforts to form a living bx community of cooperating experts across the identified subdisciplines. This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 11031 with abstracts of tutorials, working groups, and presentations on specific research topics

Enterprise Modelling using Algebraic Graph Transformation - Extended Version

An analysis of today's situation at Credit Suisse has shown severe problems, because it is based on current best practices and ad-hoc modelling techniques to handle important aspects of security, risk and compliance. Based on this analysis we propose in this paper a new enterprise model which allows the construction, integration, transformation and evaluation of different organizational models in a big decentralized organization like Credit Suisse. The main idea of the new model framework is to provide small decentralized models and intra-model evaluation techniques to handle services, processes and rules separately for the business and IT universe on one hand and for human-centric and machine-centric concepts on the other hand. Furthermore, the new framework provides inter-modelling techniques based on algebraic graph transformation to establish the connection between different kinds of models and to allow integration of the decentralized models. In order to check for security, risk and compliance in a suitable way, our models and techniques are based on different kinds of formal methods. In this paper, we show that algebraic graph transformation techniques are useful not only for intra-modelling - using graph grammars for visual languages and graph constraints for requirements - but also for inter-modelling - using triple graph grammars for model transformation and integration. Altogether, we present the overall idea of our new model framework and show how to solve specific problems concerning intra- and inter-modelling as first steps. This should give evidence that our framework can also handle important other requirements for enterprise modelling in a big decentralized organization like Credit Suisse

Using a Triple Graph Grammar for State Machine Implementations

Typical techniques of model-driven development use graph transformations to manipulate models and use generators to produce source code. In this contribution we suggest to use graph transformations instead of generators in order to get a closer connection between model and code. We define a Triple Graph Grammar for the mapping from a modeling tool data format to source code and derive a sample set of transformation rules from this. Thereby both truly simultaneous manipulation of model and code is enabled as well as virtually simultaneous manipulation by direct propagation of changes from code to model and back again

Knowledge Management and Cultural Heritage Repositories. Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval Strategies

In the last years important initiatives, like the development of the European Library and Europeana, aim to increase the availability of cultural content from various types of providers and institutions. The accessibility to these resources requires the development of environments which allow both to manage multilingual complexity and to preserve the semantic interoperability. The creation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications is finalized to the achievement of CrossLingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). This paper presents an ongoing research on language processing based on the LexiconGrammar (LG) approach with the goal of improving knowledge management in the Cultural Heritage repositories. The proposed framework aims to guarantee interoperability between multilingual systems in order to overcome crucial issues like cross-language and cross-collection retrieval. Indeed, the LG methodology tries to overcome the shortcomings of statistical approaches as in Google Translate or Bing by Microsoft concerning Multi-Word Unit (MWU) processing in queries, where the lack of linguistic context represents a serious obstacle to disambiguation. In particular, translations concerning specific domains, as it is has been widely recognized, is unambiguous since the meanings of terms are mono-referential and the type of relation that links a given term to its equivalent in a foreign language is biunivocal, i.e. a one-to-one coupling which causes this relation to be exclusive and reversible. Ontologies are used in CLIR and are considered by several scholars a promising research area to improve the effectiveness of Information Extraction (IE) techniques particularly for technical-domain queries. Therefore, we present a methodological framework which allows to map both the data and the metadata among the language-specific ont

An introduction to Graph Data Management

A graph database is a database where the data structures for the schema and/or instances are modeled as a (labeled)(directed) graph or generalizations of it, and where querying is expressed by graph-oriented operations and type constructors. In this article we present the basic notions of graph databases, give an historical overview of its main development, and study the main current systems that implement them