This JOT special section contains four extended and peer reviewed papers from the first edition of the Extreme Modeling Workshop (XM2012) held on October 1st, 2012 in Innsbruck, Austria as satellite event of the 15th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages & Systems (MODELS2012).
The goal of XM 2012 was to bring together both researchers in the area of modeling and model management in order to discuss more disciplined techniques and engineering tools to support flexibility in several forms in a wide range of modeling activities, including metamodel, model, and model transformation definition processes. The workshop aimed at a) better identifying the difficulties in the current practices of MDE related to the lack of flexibility and b) soliciting contributions of ideas, concepts, and techniques also from other areas of software engineering, such as that of specific language communities (e.g. the Smalltalk and Haskell communities, and the dynamic languages community). These contributions could be useful to revise certain fundamental concepts of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), such as the conformance relation.
From 8 initial submissions we selected 4 papers by means of at least two rounds of reviews. All papers were refereed by three well-known experts in the fields. The selected papers are the following:
- Vadim Zaytsev in his paper entitled Negotiated Grammar Evolution presents a study about the adaptability of metamodel transformations. In particular, some metamodel transformation paradigms, like unidirectional programmable grammar transformation, are rather rigid. They are written to work with one input grammar, and are not easily adapted if the grammar changes. In the paper, the author proposes a solution able to entail isolation of the applicability assertions into a component separate from the rest of the transformation engine, and enhancing the simple accept-and-proceed vs reject-and-halt scheme into one that proposes a list of valid alternative arguments and allows the other transformation participant to choose from it and negotiate the intended level of adaptability and robustness.
- Paola Gómez, Mario Sánchez, Héctor Florez and Jorge Villalobos in their paper entitled An approach to the co-creation of models and metamodels in Enterprise Architecture Projects discuss the problems related to the lack of dynamicity of model editors and the impossibility to load new metamodels at runtime. In the paper, they present an approach able to address such problems by separating ontological and linguistic aspects of metamodels. The GraCoT tool is an implementation of the approach based on GMF and it is also discussed in the paper.
- Konstantinos Barmpis and Dimitrios S. Kolovos in their paper entitled Evaluation of Contemporary Graph Databases for Efficient Persistence of Large-Scale Models compare the commonly used persistence mechanisms in MDE with novel approaches such as the use of graph-based NoSQL databases. Prototype integrations of Neo4J and OrientDB with EMF are used to compare with relational database, XMI and document-based NoSQL database persistence mechanisms. The paper benchmarks also two approaches for querying models persisted in graph databases to measure and compare their relative performance in terms of memory usage and execution time.
- Zoe Zarwin, Marija Bjekovic, Jean-Marie Favre, Jean-Sébastien Sottet, and Henderik A. Proper in their paper entitled Natural Modelling motivate the need for instruments that enable a wider adoption of modeling technologies. To this end it is necessary that such technologies are perceived as natural as possible. After having defined the natural modeling concept, the authors discuss how human aspects of modeling could be better instrumented in the future by using modern technologies.
We would like to thank everyone who has made this special section possible. In particular, we are obliged to the referees for giving off their time to thoroughly and thoughtfully review and re-review papers, to the authors for their hard work on several revisions of their papers, from workshop submission to journal acceptance, and to the JOT editorial board for organising this special issue.
Davide Di Ruscio, University of L’Aquila (Italy)
Alfonso Pierantonio, University of L’Aquila (Italy)
Juan de Lara, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)