Keynote Speech at WATERS 2013 - July 9th, 2013, 10.00am

Abstract

The principle of separating concerns is widely used in engineering to address complexity. In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), this principle notably led to the development of Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSML). Those languages provide constructs that are directly aligned with the concepts of the domain in question. A specific domain, in the broad sense, can be an application domain (e.g. auto-motive) or a specific concern (e.g. requirement modeling). This coincides nicely with the vision specified in the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard which suggests that each stakeholder needs dedicated viewpoints to address his or her concerns. It is the responsibility of language designers and methodologists to provide the DSMLs that support these viewpoints. And, it is the responsibility of tool designers to provide appropriate user interfaces to corresponding language authoring tools.

This is precisely what Papyrus project provides: a modeling environment that let language designers define their DSML for a specific viewpoint and let tool designers configure the modeling environment to support the desired viewpoint. However, Papyrus provides those features under the following motto: “Don’t reinvent the wheel, adopt UML instead but tailor it to your needs”. To do that, Papyrus provides a UML profile editor to let language designer define the DSML. But, more important, Papyrus provides means to tool designers to customize the modeling environment in order to tailor the UI to corresponding viewpoint. Papyrus is therefore a generic modeling environment that can be customized to support UML-based DSML.

This talk will present the key concepts and features that are available today in Papyrus to define and implement UML-based DSMLs. It will especially show how UML-based DSML can be much more than just an extension of the UML metamodel. We will also introduce features that are coming soon together with those we plan to develop in the long term.