Tuple-based morphisms for interoperability establishment of financial information models

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e ComputadoresThe current financial crisis has demonstrated that there is a need for financial accounting data in a format which can be rapidly analyzed and exchanged. The appearance of XBRL in 2000 has helped create a ‘de facto’ standard data format for the exchange of financial information. However, XBRL by itself is not capable of ensuring a common semantic for the exchange of accounting information. Additionally, the existence of different accounting standards in different countries is a hindrance to efficient analysis and evaluation of companies by international analysts or investors. Therefore, there is a need to not only use a more advanced data format, but also for tools which can facilitate the exchange of accounting data, in particular when different accounting standards are used. This dissertation presents a tuple-based semantic and structural mapping for interoperability establishment of financial information models based on the use of ontologies and a ‘Communication Mediator’. It allows the mapping of accounting concepts of different accounting standards to be stored in the ‘Communication Mediator’. The mapping stored contains an ATL code expression, which with the aid of model transformation tools, can be utilized to perform the mapping between two different accounting models

An algebraic semantics for QVT-relations check-only transformations

Fundamenta Informaticae, 114 1, Juan de Lara, Esther Guerra, An algebraic semantics for QVT-relations check-only transformations, 73-101, Copyright 2012, with permission from IOS PressQVT is the standard for model transformation defined by the OMG in the context of the Model-Driven Architecture. It is made of several transformation languages. Among them, QVT-Relations is the one with the highest level of abstraction, as it permits developing bidirectional transformations in a declarative, relational style. Unfortunately, the standard only provides a semiformal description of its semantics, which hinders analysis and has given rise to ambiguities in existing tool implementations. In order to improve this situation, we propose a formal, algebraic semantics for QVT-Relations check-only transformations, defining a notion of satisfaction of QVT-Relations specifications by models.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation with projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081) and Go Lite (TIN2011-24139), and by the R&D program of the Community of Madrid with project “e-Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650)

Revised submission for MOF 2.0 query / views / transformations RFP.

This submission presents the QVT-Partners proposal for the MOF 2.0 QVT standard. The proposal consists of a number of key ingredients which we briefly discuss in this section. -Specification and implementation: A common scenario in the development of any artifact is to first create a specification of the form and behaviour of the the artifact, and then realise an implementation which satisfies the specification. The specification is characterised by a lack of implementation details, but having a close correspondence to the requirements; conversely an implementation may lack close correspondence to the requirements. This submission maintains this important distinction. Relations provide a specification oriented view of the relationship between models and are specified in a language that can be easily understood. They say what it means to translate between several models but without saying precisely how the translation is achieved. Those details are realised by mappings which characterise the means by which models are translated. It should be noted though, that while the mappings language is rich enough to provide an implementation of relations it also manages to maintain a requirements oriented focus. This may give rise to a scenario where developers prefer to omit relations and directly define mappings. -Scalability and reuse: Decomposition is a key approach to managing complexity. This submission provides a number of composition mechanisms whereby relations and mappings can be composed to form more complex specifications. These mechanisms also aid reuse since mappings and relations can be treated as reusable components which are composed for specific contexts. -Usability: Diagrammatic notations have been important to the success of many OMG standards. This proposal presents a diagrammatic notation which is an extension of collaboration object diagrams and is therefore familiar to many end users. A criticism often levelled at diagrammatic notations is their scalability. This submission also presents a textual syntax, constructs of the diagrammatic notations are closely aligned with its textual counterpart. Considering the domains of relations and mappings at the generic type level is often too limiting. Instead it often is specific-types of things that are of interest. This submission uses patterns to describe the domains of both relations and mappings. Patterns are a means of succinctly describing specific-types of model elements and enable domains of interest to be rapidly stated with ease. -Semantic soundness: By definition a standard should give rise to consistency across differing implementations. It is important that an end user can get the same results on two different implementations. For this reason, this submission goes to some effort to ensure that all the constructs have a well-defined semantic basis. This is achieved by treating the submission in two parts. The infrastructure part has a small number of constructs which can be easily and consistently understood from informal descriptions (although a mathematical semantics is given in Appendix B for the sake of completeness and rigour). The superstructure part uses the infrastructure as its semantic basis and defines the syntax that the end user deals with. The relationship between the superstructure and the infrastructure is expressed as a translation

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain

Implementing QVT-R bidirectional model transformations using alloy

QVT Relations (QVT-R) is the standard language proposed by the OMG to specify bidirectional model transformations. Unfortunately, in part due to ambiguities and omissions in the original semantics, acceptance and development of effective tool support has been slow. Recently, the checking semantics of QVT-R has been clarified and formalized. In this paper we propose a QVT-R tool that complies to such semantics. Unlike any other existing tool, it also supports meta-models enriched with OCL constraints (thus avoiding returning ill-formed models), and proposes an alternative enforcement semantics that works according to the simple and predictable “principle of least change”. The implementation is based on an embedding of both QVT-R transformations and UML class diagrams (annotated with OCL) in Alloy, a lightweight formal specification language with support for automatic model finding via SAT solving.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain

Evaluation of the QVT Merge Language Proposal

-STF90 A05045This report has identified 29 weighted evaluation criteria representing desired properties of a model to model transformation language. These criteria have been used to evaluate the current QVT Merge specification. We have so far only been able to evaluate 21 of these criteria, mainly due to missing tool support. Some of the criteria are considered absolute in the sense that missing to fulfil such a criterion is considered a failure. The 21 evaluated criteria give a score of 59 out of a maximum possible score of 68 (language-based + example-based testing). We have also compared the QVT-Merge submission with the QVT-Compuware/Sun submission and at the time being the QVT-Merge seems to be the preferred one due to more support on the absolute criteria and better easy-to-use score. Eight transformation examples for solving six different transformation tasks have given a lot of insight on the ease of use criteria for both simple and complex transformations. When defining transformations using QVT Merge we believe that a lot of effort may be required in order to define the source and target  metamodels. The evaluation in this report could be improved by using the reference examples with alternative approaches published in the literature. An available QVT-Merge tool is necessary in order to provide evaluations of all the suggested criteria. In order to further investigate the usability of the graphical notation, we need to define more of the transformation examples graphically. Only one of the examples has been specified graphically in this version. The current evaluation has been done by a single evaluator who has only reviewed the transformation code that was written by somebody else. The evaluation will be further improved by incorporating input from other evaluators as well as evaluation from those who wrote the transformation code. Oppdragsgiver: EU Commissio

Formal support for QVT-Relations with Coloured Petri nets

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_19Proceedings of 12th International Conference, MODELS 2009, Denver, CO, USA, October 4-9, 2009QVT is the OMG standard language for specifying model-to-model transformations in MDA. Even though it plays a crucial role in model driven development, there are scarce tools supporting the execution of its sublanguage QVT-Relations, and none for its analysis or verification. In order to alleviate this situation, this paper provides a formal semantics for QVT-Relations through its compilation into Coloured Petri nets, enabling the execution and validation of QVT specifications. The theory of Petri nets provides useful techniques to analyse transformations (e.g. reachability, model-checking, boundedness and invariants) and to determine their confluence and termination given a starting model. We also report on using CPNTools for the execution, debugging, and analysis of transformations, and on a tool chain to transform QVT-Relations specifications into the input format of CPNTools.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081) and MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678