Modeling Language Variability
This work addresses the need for formal methods in modeling language adaptation, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal approaches without demonstrating broad impact.
The paper tackles the problem of systematically defining variants of modeling languages to adapt them to specific needs, and it introduces the notion of semantic language refinement to formally reason about language variants and their semantics.
A systematic way of defining variants of a modeling language is useful for adopting the language to domain or project specific needs. Variants can be obtained by adopting the syntax or semantics of the language. In this paper, we take a formal approach to define modeling language variability and show how this helps to reason about language variants, models, and their semantics formally. We introduce the notion of semantic language refinement meaning that one semantics variant is implied by another.