Systematically Deriving Domain-Specific Transformation Languages
This work addresses the usability issue for modelers in software engineering by making transformations more intuitive, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformation concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of modelers needing to learn the abstract syntax of modeling languages to perform transformations, by presenting a process to systematically derive a textual domain-specific transformation language from a grammar, resulting in CDTrans for UML class diagrams that uses familiar concrete syntax.
Model transformations are helpful to evolve, refactor, refine and maintain models. While domain-specific languages are normally intuitive for modelers, common model transformation approaches (regardless of whether they transform graphical or textual models) are based on the modeling language's abstract syntax requiring the modeler to learn the internal representation of the model to describe transformations. This paper presents a process that allows to systematically derive a textual domainspecific transformation language from the grammar of a given textual modeling language. As example, we apply this systematic derivation to UML class diagrams to obtain a domain-specific transformation language called CDTrans. CDTrans incorporates the concrete syntax of class diagrams which is already familiar to the modeler and extends it with a few transformation operators. To demonstrate the usefulness of the derived transformation language, we describe several refactoring transformations.