Reusable textual styles for domain-specific modeling languages

Patrick Neubauer, Robert Bill, Dimitris Kolovos, Richard Paige, Manuel Wimmer

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Domain-specific languages enable concise and precise formalization of domain concepts and promote direct employment by domain experts. Therefore, syntactic constructs are introduced to empower users to associate concepts and relationships with visual textual symbols. Model-based language engineering facilitates the description of concepts and relationships in an abstract manner. However, concrete representations are commonly attached to abstract domain representations, such as annotations in metamodels, or directly encoded into language grammar and thus introduce redundancy between metamodel elements and grammar elements. In this work we propose an approach that enables autonomous development and maintenance of domain concepts and textual language notations in a distinctive and metamodel-agnostic manner by employing style models containing grammar rule templates and injection-based property selection. We provide an implementation and showcase the proposed notationspecification language in a comparison with state of the art practices during the creation of notations for an executable domain-specific modeling language based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework and Xtext.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)67-80
Number of pages14
JournalCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Volume2513
Publication statusPublished - 6 Dec 2019
Event19th International Workshop in OCL and Textual Modeling, OCL 2019 - Munich, Germany
Duration: 16 Sept 2019 → …

Bibliographical note

© 2019 The Authors.

Keywords

  • Concrete syntax
  • Domain-specific language
  • Domain-Specific modeling
  • Language engineering
  • Model-driven engineering
  • Notation

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