Today the syntax of many languages is defined by using context-free grammars. These syntax definitions suffer from a major drawback: grammars do not allow the definition of abstract, reusable concept definitions. Especially in families of related languages, where multiple languages often share the same concepts, this limitation leads to unnecessary reproduction of concept definitions and a missing shared base for these related languages. Metamodels can contain inheritance hierarchies of concepts; thus multiple specifications can reuse and refine existing shared concept definitions. Therefore we propose a method to develop metamodels from existing syntax definitions. We explain our method by applying it to SDL-2000. The method starts with a mapping from BNF grammars into simple preliminary metamodels. Then, by supplying a relation between elements of these simple metamodels and abstract concepts, these metamodels are automatically transformed into metamodels that use existing descriptions of abstract concepts and thus allow a shared basis of common abstract concepts definitions.
Abstract. Model driven engineering is a popular attempt to deal with the complexity of modern software systems. For the telecommunication sector a model driven approach means that you have to handle half a dozen ITU-T modelling languages in a single process to cover all aspects of telecommunication system development. Unfortunately, this is a difficult task, because the ITU-T languages are hard to use together. That is why the ITU-T started the Unified Language Family (ULF) initiative with the goal to unify the ITU-T language definitions and allow an easier alignment and integrated use of these languages. We present a tooling framework for those ULF languages; it is called ULF-ware. Our framework uses metamodelling and a shared use of common language concepts for a tight language integration. Around these language models it incorporates a set of tools to cover the various responsibilities of development environments such as program parsing, model checking, model transformation, and code generation. This paper shows work in progress. We demonstrate our ideas on a tool chain for a subset of SDL. But the overall goal is an open framework that is extendable with other languages, even beyond ULF, and with tools for other software engineering tasks, like model simulation or software deployment.
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