Engineering bidirectional transformations

Bidirectional transformations, like software, need to be carefully engineered in order to provide guarantees about their correctness, completeness, acceptability and usability. This paper summarises a collection of lectures pertaining to engineering bidirectional transformations using Model-Driven Engineering techniques and technologies. It focuses on stages of a typical engineering lifecycle, starting with requirements and progressing to implementation and verification. It summarises Model-Driven Engineering approaches to capturing requirements, architectures and designs for bidirectional transformations, and suggests an approach for verification as well. It concludes by describing some challenges for future research into engineering bidirectional transformations

Language engineering : Challenges, opportunities and potential disasters for interactive systems

Language engineering underpins model-driven engineering and the application of domain-specific languages. In this talk, I will introduce language engineering and its principles and practices, using model-driven engineering as an exemplar. I will suggest how the engineering of interactive systems offers opportunities, challenges and the potential for chaos for language engineering

Foreign Judgments in American and English Courts: A Comparative Analysis

Part II of this Comment provides some background on the current American scheme of foreign judgment recognition and enforcement by comparing and contrasting its three major components American common law, the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law, and the Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act. Part III tracks the English scheme of foreign judgment recognition and enforcement from its common law origin to its more sophisticated and streamlined foreign judgment registration system. Finally, Part IV suggests that the United States could benefit from the implementation of federal legislation that would bring foreign judgment registration procedures to American courts and provide for the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments on a national level

Putting formal specifications under the magnifying glass: Model-based testing for validation

A software development process is effectively an abstract form of model transformation, starting from an end-user model of requirements, through to a system model for which code can be automatically generated. The success (or failure) of such a transformation depends substantially on obtaining a correct, well-formed initial model that captures user concerns. Model-based testing automates black box testing based on the model of the system under analysis. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel model-based testing technique that aims to reveal specification/requirement-related errors by generating test cases from a test model and exercising them on the design model. The case study outlined in the paper shows that a separate test model not only increases the level of objectivity of the requirements, but also supports the validation of the system under test through test case generation. The results obtained from the case study support the hypothesis that there may be discrepancies between the formal specification of the system modeled at developer end and the problem to be solved, and using solely formal verification methods may not be sufficient to reveal these. The approach presented in this paper aims at providing means to obtain greater confidence in the design model that is used as the basis for code generation

Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized

User-visible cryptography in email and web scenarios

Purpose– This paper aims to classify different types of “user-visible cryptography” and evaluate the value of user-visible cryptographic mechanisms in typical email and web scenarios for non-expert IT users.Design/methodology/approach– The authors review the existing literature, and then identify user stories typical to their users of interest. They analyse the risks, mitigations of risks and the limits of those mitigations in the user stories.Findings– The scenarios identified suggest that background, opportunistic encryption has value, but more explicit, user-visible cryptographic mechanisms do not provide any further mitigation. Other mechanisms beyond technological mitigations provide the required mitigation for the users.Research limitations/implications– Further work should be carried out on the trust issues with trusted third parties, as they are intrinsic to global, automated cryptographic mechanisms. The authors suggest that deployed systems should rely on automation rather than explicit user involvement; further work on how best to involve users effectively remains valuable.Practical implications– Deployed systems should rely on automation rather than explicit user dialogues. This follows from recognised aspects of user behaviour, such as ignoring dialogues and unconsciously making a holistic assessment of risk that is mostly mitigated by social factors.Social implications– The user populations concerned rely significantly on the existing legal and social infrastructure to mitigate some risks, such as those associated with e-commerce. Guarantees from third parties and the existence of fallback procedures improve user confidence.Originality/value– This work uses user stories as a basis for a holistic review of the issues surrounding the use of cryptography. The authors concentrate on a relatively large population (non-expert IT users) carrying out typical tasks (web and email).</jats:sec

An Approach for Model Querying-by-Example Applied to Multi- Paradigm Models

Scenarios for industry-scale multi-paradigm modelling involve analysis,transformation, or fine-grained manipulation of models. These models are often treatedwholly or in part as trees (e.g. XML or XMI documents, or source code). However,existing facilities for accessing and manipulating models as trees is limited. We present anovel approach to model querying-by-example, treating models as trees. The approachabstracts away from platform-specific concerns (e.g. XML), and exploits tree-basedpatterns in expressing queries; the results of queries are also trees, thus providing meansto compose (conjoin) queries without requiring intermediate manipulations

The Epsilon Pattern Language

We present the Epsilon Pattern Language (EPL), a textual language that supports expressing and detecting patterns on models conforming to arbitrary metamodels and captured using diverse modelling technologies. EPL provides out-of-the-box integration with existing languages that target a wide range of related model management activities (such as model validation, model-to-model and model-to-text transformation), thus enabling code reuse and seamless runtime interoperability across complex Model-Driven Engineering workflows. We discuss the syntax and semantics of EPL, its supporting development tools, and demonstrate how instances of patterns detected using EPL can be consumed and further processed by other model management programs