Ontologies in domain specific languages : a systematic literature review

The systematic literature review conducted in this paper explores the current techniques employed to leverage the development of DSLs using ontologies. Similarities and differences between ontologies and DSLs, techniques to combine DSLs with ontologies, the rationale of these techniques and challenges in the DSL approaches addressed by the used techniques have been investigated. Details about these topics have been provided for each relevant research paper that we were able to investigate in the limited amount of time of one month. At the same time, a synthesis describing the main trends in all the topics mentioned above has been done

MetaMod: a modeling formalism with modularity at its core

Because modern engineering products require more and more functionality, the models used in the design of these products get larger and more complex. A way to handle this complexity would be a suitable mechanism to modularize models. However, current approaches in the Model Driven Engineering field have limited support for modularity. This is the gap that our research addresses. We want to tackle the gap by designing and creating a modeling formalism with modularity at its core - MetaMod. We are including the modeling formalism into a prototype such that we can experiment with it. Our evaluation plan includes bootstrapping MetaMod (defining MetaMod in MetaMod) and creating an industrial DSL in MetaMod

MetaMod: a modeling formalism with modularity at its core

Because modern engineering products require more and more functionality, the models used in the design of these products get larger and more complex. A way to handle this complexity would be a suitable mechanism to modularize models. However, current approaches in the Model Driven Engineering field have limited support for modularity. This is the gap that our research addresses. We want to tackle the gap by designing and creating a modeling formalism with modularity at its core - MetaMod. We are including the modeling formalism into a prototype such that we can experiment with it. Our evaluation plan includes bootstrapping MetaMod (defining MetaMod in MetaMod) and creating an industrial DSL in MetaMod

Exploration of modularity and reusability of domain-specific languages: an expression DSL in MetaMod

Language-oriented programming (LOP) advocates a way of creating software systems that starts from the development of a domain-specific language (DSL). The DSL is geared towards solving computational problems in a particular domain. Developers then use the DSL to express configurations, rules, algorithms or knowledge for this particular domain at higher levels of abstraction than those achievable with a general-purpose programming language. Achieving the vision of LOP requires methods to ease the creation and the reuse of DSLs. One of the most likely technologies to achieve the vision of LOP are the projectional language workbenches because of the flexibility they add in DSL notation and DSL modularity. Modularity, in particular, is a key factor in easing the creation and reuse of DSLs. We have previously designed a new method and associated meta-tools, called MetaMod, for the creation of modular and reusable DSLs. The goal in this article is to demonstrate what the advantages of MetaMod are in terms of creating modular and reusable DSLs compared to the state-of-the-art projectional language workbench Jetbrains MPS. To this end, we took a comprehensive expression language, the iets3 expression DSL written in Jetbrains MPS, and redefined a fragment of it in MetaMod; we use part of this reimplemented expression language as a running example in the article. This allowed us to make a better comparison with creating DSLs in MPS. Moreover, in the process, we also highlighted the main features of MetaMod concerning modularity and reuse. As a result of the comparison we underline the main advantage that MetaMod brings in the implementation of modular and reusable DSLs, that is, the possibility to create smaller, more conceptually cohesive DSLs. This makes DSLs more fit for reuse. Furthermore, we present an extensive overview of related work regarding features of language tools for creating modular and reusable DSLs

Pattern specification and application in metamodels in Ecore

The increased use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) and the absence of adequate tooling to take advantage of commonalities among DSLs has led to a situation where the same structure is duplicated in multiple DSLs. This observation has lead to the work described in this paper: an investigation of methods and tools for pattern specification and application and two extensions of a state of the art tool for patterns in DSLs, DSL-tao. The extensions make the patterns more understandable and they also make the tool suitable for more patterns. The first extension introduces a literal specification for patterns and the second extension introduces a merge function for the application of patterns. These two extensions<br/