Applying attribute grammars for metamodel semantics

Abstract

While current metamodelling languages are well-suited for the structural definition of abstract syntax and metamodelling infrastructures like the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) provide various means for the specification of a textual or graphical concrete syntax, techniques for the specification of model semantics are not as matured. Therefore, we propose the application of reference attribute grammars (RAGs) to alleviate the lack of support for formal semantics specification in metamodelling. We contribute the conceptual foundations to integrate metamodelling languages and RAGs, and present JastEMF -a tool for the specification of EMF metamodel semantics using JastAdd RAGs. The application of JastEMF is illustrated by an integrated metamodelling example.

Attribute Grammar Applied to Human Activities Recognition in Intelligent Environments

“…The lexical analysis has as the main goal to analyse the inputs and convert them into a set of terminal symbols. The result of this processing is used in the syntactical phase to generate an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) (Bürger et al, 2010). These two first phases can be applied to intelligent environments once this kind of domain should be filled with sensors sending raw data to be analysed by a contextaware system.…”

“…Another characteristic of AGs is the possibility of manipulation of the attribute values at any node of the tree (Bürger et al, 2010). This feature is very important once in an intelligent environment the states of entities (attribute values in AGs) may change frequently and their values must be available to be used by the system at any time, with different purposes.…”

Knowledge Inference Through Analysis of Human Activities

“…The main advantage of attribute grammars is that they allow lexical, syntactic and semantic data verification. According to (Burger et al, 2010), in the first step (lexical analysis), the data is transformed into terminal symbols and will represent leaves (terminal nodes) in an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). Then, non-terminal symbols are organized into a hierarchical structure, creating the AST, (syntactic analysis).At last (semantic analysis phase), the actual data associated with the symbols in the AST nodes via inherited or synthesized attributes is processed, considering pre-established semantic rules, to extract (infer) new contextual information and ensure the correctness of the input as required to produce the desired output.…”

On the design of enterprise ontology-driven software development

“…In practice, metamodels are only capable to express the concrete syntax [236,169,65], describing the possible structure of (valid) models, i.e., instances of the metamodel [408,13,428,227], mostly with an implied or informal semantics. However, without a formal semantics, multiple developers can interpret the same model in different ways; only with formal semantics it can be guaranteed that the interpretation conforms precisely with the conceptualization that was modeled [190,394].…”