Applications of graph transformation in tools for domain-specific modeling languages

The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) has been proposed as an approach to cost-e ectively develop families of software systems in a restricted application domain. Domain-specific languages in combination with the accumulated knowledge and experience of previous implementations, can in turn be used to generate new applications with unique sets of requirements. For this reason, DSLs are considered to be an important approach for software reuse. However, the toolset supporting a particular domain-specific language is also domain-specific and is per definition not reusable. Therefore, creating and maintaining a DSL requires additional resources that could be even larger than the savings associated with using them. As a solution, di erent tool frameworks have been proposed to simplify and reduce the cost of developments of DSLs. Developers of tool support for DSLs need to instantiate, customize or configure the framework for a particular DSL. There are di erent approaches for this. An approach is to use an application programming interface (API) and to extend the basic framework using an imperative programming language. An example of a tools which is based on this approach is Eclipse GEF. Another approach is to configure the framework using declarative languages that are independent of the underlying framework implementation. We believe this second approach can bring important benefits as this brings focus to specifying what should the tool be like instead of writing a program specifying how the tool achieves this functionality. In this thesis we explore this second approach. We use graph transformation as the basic approach to customize a domain-specific modeling (DSM) tool framework. The contributions of this thesis includes a comparison of di erent approaches for defining, representing and interchanging software modeling languages and models and a tool architecture for an open domain-specific modeling framework that e ciently integrates several model transformation components and visual editors. We also present several specific algorithms and tool components for DSM framework. These include an approach for graph query based on region operators and the star operator and an approach for reconciling models and diagrams after executing model transformation programs. We exemplify our approach with two case studies MICAS and EFCO. In these studies we show how our experimental modeling tool framework has been used to define tool environments for domain-specific languages.

Domain-Specific Language for Coordination patterns

The integration and composition of software systems requires a good architectural design phase to speed up communications between (remote) components. However, during implementation phase, the code to coordinate such components often ends up mixed in the main business code. This leads to maintenance problems, raising the need for, on the one hand, separating the coordination code from the business code, and on the other hand, providing mechanisms for analysis and comprehension of the architectural decisions once made. In this context our aim is at developing a domain-specific language, CoordL, to describe typical coordination patterns. From our point of view, coordination patterns are abstractions, in a graph form, over the composition of coordination statements from the system code. These patterns would allow us to identify, by means of pattern-based graph search strategies, the code responsible for the coordination of the several components in a system. The recovering and separation of the architectural decisions for a better comprehension of the software is the main purpose of this pattern language

Software languages engineering: experimental evaluation

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Framework-specific DSL para sensoriamento participado

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

A domain specific language for domotic systems

To cope with modernity, the interesting of having a fully automated house has been increasing over the years, as technology evolves and as our lives become more stressful and overloaded. An automation system provides a way to simplify some daily tasks, allowing us to have more spare time to perform activities where we are really needed. There are some systems in this domain that try to implement these characteristics, but this kind of technology is at its early stages of evolution being that it is still far away of empowering the user with the desired control over a habitation. The reason is that the mentioned systems miss some important features such as adaptability, extension and evolution. These systems, developed from a bottom-up approach, are often tailored for programmers and domain experts, discarding most of the times the end users that remain with unfinished interfaces or products that they have difficulty to control. Moreover, complex behaviors are avoided, since they are extremely difficult to implement mostly due to the necessity of handling priorities, conflicts and device calibration. Besides, these solutions are only reachable at very high costs, yet they still have the limitation of being difficult to configure by non-technical people once in runtime operation. As a result, it is necessary to create a tool that allows the execution of several automated actions, with an interface that is easy to use but at the same time supports all the main features of this domain. It is also desirable that this tool is independent of the hardware so it can be reused, thus a Model Driven Development approach (MDD) is the ideal option, as it is a method that follows those principles. Since the automation domain has some very specific concepts, the use of models should be combined with a Domain Specific Language (DSL). With these two methods, it is possible to create a solution that is adapted to the end users, but also to domain experts and programmers due to the several levels of abstraction that can be added to diminish the complexity of use. The aim of this thesis is to design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that uses the Model Driven Development approach (MDD), with the purpose of supporting Home Automation (HA) concepts. In this implementation, the development of simple and complex scenarios should be supported and will be one of the most important concerns. This DSL should also support other significant features in this domain, such as the ability to schedule tasks, which is something that is limited in the current existing solutions.

A domain-specific language for ETL patterns specification in Data Warehousing Systems

During the last few years many research efforts have been done to improve the design of ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) systems. ETL systems are considered very time-consuming, error-prone and complex involving several participants from different knowledge domains. ETL processes are one of the most important components of a data warehousing system that are strongly influenced by the complexity of business requirements, their changing and evolution. These aspects influence not only the structure of a data warehouse but also the structures of the data sources involved with. To minimize the negative impact of such variables, we propose the use of ETL patterns to build specific ETL packages. In this paper, we formalize this approach using BPMN (Business Process Modelling Language) for modelling more conceptual ETL workflows, mapping them to real execution primitives through the use of a domain-specific language that allows for the generation of specific instances that can be executed in an ETL commercial tool.

Mining and exploiting domain-specific corpora in the PANACEA platform

The objective of the PANACEA ICT-2007.2.2 EU project is to build a platform that automates the stages involved in the acquisition,production, updating and maintenance of the large language resources required by, among others, MT systems. The development of a Corpus Acquisition Component (CAC) for extracting monolingual and bilingual data from the web is one of the most innovative building blocks of PANACEA. The CAC, which is the first stage in the PANACEA pipeline for building Language Resources, adopts an efficient and distributed methodology to crawl for web documents with rich textual content in specific languages and predefined domains. The CAC includes modules that can acquire parallel data from sites with in-domain content available in more than one language. In order to extrinsically evaluate the CAC methodology, we have conducted several experiments that used crawled parallel corpora for the identification and extraction of parallel sentences using sentence alignment. The corpora were then successfully used for domain adaptation of Machine Translation Systems.

Embedding Languages Without Breaking Tools

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly used as embedded languages within general-purpose host languages. DSLs provide a compact, dedicated syntax for specifying parts of an application related to specialized domains. Unfortunately, such language extensions typically do not integrate well with the development tools of the host language. Editors, compilers and debuggers are either unaware of the extensions, or must be adapted at a non-trivial cost. We present a novel approach to embed DSLs into an existing host language by leveraging the underlying representation of the host language used by these tools. Helvetia is an extensible system that intercepts the compilation pipeline of the Smalltalk host language to seamlessly integrate language extensions. We validate our approach by case studies that demonstrate three fundamentally different ways to extend or adapt the host language syntax and semantics.

Domain-Specific Program Checking

Lint-like program checkers are popular tools that ensure code quality by verifying compliance with best practices for a particular programming language. The proliferation of internal domain-specific languages and models, however, poses new challenges for such tools. Traditional program checkers produce many false positives and fail to accurately check constraints, best practices, common errors, possible optimizations and portability issues particular to domain-specific languages. We advocate the use of dedicated rules to check domain-specific practices. We demonstrate the implementation of domain-specific rules, the automatic fixing of violations, and their application to two case-studies: (1) Seaside defines several internal DSLs through a creative use of the syntax of the host language; and (2) Magritte adds meta-descriptions to existing code by means of special methods. Our empirical validation demonstrates that domain-specific program checking significantly improves code quality when compared with general purpose program checking.

Domain Globalization: Using Languages to Support Technical and Social Coordination

When a project is realized in a globalized environment, multiple stakeholders from different organizations work on the same system. Depending on the stakeholders and their organizations, various (possibly overlapping) concerns are raised in the development of the system. In this context a Domain Specific Language (DSL) supports the work of a group of stakeholders who are responsible for addressing a specific set of concerns. This chapter identifies the open challenges arising from the coordination of globalized domain-specific languages. We identify two types of coordination: technical coordination and social coordination. After presenting an overview of the current state of the art, we discuss first the open challenges arising from the composition of multiple DSLs, and then the open challenges associated to the collaboration in a globalized environment.

A comparative study of translation strategies applied in dealing with role languages. : A translation analysis of the video game Final Fantasy XIV

Localisation is the process of taking a product and adapting it to fit the culture in question. This usually involves making it both linguistically and culturally appropriate for the target audience. While there are many areas in video game translations where localisation holds a factor, this study will focus on localisation changes in the personalities of fictional characters between the original Japanese version and the English localised version of the video game Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and its expansion Heavensward for PC, PS3 and PS4. With this in mind, specific examples are examined using Satoshi Kinsui's work on yakuwarigo, role language as the main framework for this study. Five non-playable characters were profiled and had each of their dialogues transcribed for a comparative analysis. This included the original Japanese text, the officially localised English text and a translation of the original Japanese text done by myself. Each character were also given a short summary and a reasoned speculation on why these localisation changes might have occurred. The result shows that there were instances where some translations had been deliberately adjusted to ensure that the content did not cause any problematic issues to players overseas. This could be reasoned out that some of the Japanese role languages displayed by characters in this game could potentially cause dispute among the western audience. In conclusion, the study shows that localisation can be a difficult process that not only requires a translator's knowledge of the source and target language, but also display some creativity in writing ability to ensure that players will have a comparable experience without causing a rift in the fanbase.

Exploração do UML para a derivação automática de requisitos arquitecturais. Uma abordagem orientada a modelos

O desenvolvimento de software orientado a modelos defende a utilização dos modelos como um artefacto que participa activamente no processo de desenvolvimento. O modelo ocupa uma posição que se encontra ao mesmo nível do código. Esta é uma abordagem importante que tem sido alvo de atenção crescente nos últimos tempos. O Object Management Group (OMG) é o responsável por uma das principais especificações utilizadas na definição da arquitectura dos sistemas cujo desenvolvimento é orientado a modelos: o Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Os projectos que têm surgido no âmbito da modelação e das linguagens específicas de domínio para a plataforma Eclipse são um bom exemplo da atenção dada a estas áreas. São projectos totalmente abertos à comunidade, que procuram respeitar os standards e que constituem uma excelente oportunidade para testar e por em prática novas ideias e abordagens. Nesta dissertação foram usadas ferramentas criadas no âmbito do Amalgamation Project, desenvolvido para a plataforma Eclipse. Explorando o UML e usando a linguagem QVT, desenvolveu-se um processo automático para extrair elementos da arquitectura do sistema a partir da definição de requisitos. Os requisitos são representados por modelos UML que são transformados de forma a obter elementos para uma aproximação inicial à arquitectura do sistema. No final, obtêm-se um modelo UML que agrega os componentes, interfaces e tipos de dados extraídos a partir dos modelos dos requisitos. É uma abordagem orientada a modelos que mostrou ser exequível, capaz de oferecer resultados práticos e promissora no que concerne a trabalho futuro.

Model driven development implementation of a control systems user interfaces specification tool

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Readability of medicinal package leaflets: a systematic review

OBJECTIVE To review studies on the readability of package leaflets of medicinal products for human use.METHODS We conducted a systematic literature review between 2008 and 2013 using the keywords “Readability and Package Leaflet” and “Readability and Package Insert” in the academic search engine Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online,comprising different bibliographic resources/databases. The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses criteria were applied to prepare the draft of the report. Quantitative and qualitative original studies were included. Opinion or review studies not written in English, Portuguese, Italian, French, or Spanish were excluded.RESULTS We identified 202 studies, of which 180 were excluded and 22 were enrolled [two enrolling healthcare professionals, 10 enrolling other type of participants (including patients), three focused on adverse reactions, and 7 descriptive studies]. The package leaflets presented various readability problems, such as complex and difficult to understand texts, small font size, or few illustrations. The main methods to assess the readability of the package leaflet were usability tests or legibility formulae. Limitations with these methods included reduced number of participants; lack of readability formulas specifically validated for specific languages (e.g., Portuguese); and absence of an assessment on patients literacy, health knowledge, cognitive skills, levels of satisfaction, and opinions.CONCLUSIONS Overall, the package leaflets presented various readability problems. In this review, some methodological limitations were identified, including the participation of a limited number of patients and healthcare professionals, the absence of prior assessments of participant literacy, humor or sense of satisfaction, or the predominance of studies not based on role-plays about the use of medicines. These limitations should be avoided in future studies and be considered when interpreting the results.

Supporting On-Line Distributed Monitoring and Debugging

Monitoring systems have traditionally been developed with rigid objectives and functionalities, and tied to specific languages, libraries and run-time environments. There is a need for more flexible monitoring systems which can be easily adapted to distinct requirements. On-line monitoring has been considered as increasingly important for observation and control of a distributed application. In this paper we discuss monitoring interfaces and architectures which support more extensible monitoring and control services. We describe our work on the development of a distributed monitoring infrastructure, and illustrate how it eases the implementation of a complex distributed debugging architecture. We also discuss several issues concerning support for tool interoperability and illustrate how the cooperation among multiple concurrent tools can ease the task of distributed debugging.