SUMMARY Advances in communication devices and technologies are dramatically expanding our communication capabilities and enabling a wide range of multimedia communication applications. The current approach to develop communication‐intensive applications results in products that are fragmented, inflexible, and incapable of responding to changing end‐users' communication needs. These limitations have resulted in the need for a new development approach of building communication applications that are driven by end‐users and that support the dynamic nature of communication‐based collaboration. To address this need, the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology has been developed to support rapid specification and automatic realization of user‐centric communication applications based on a domain‐specific modeling approach. The CVM technology consists of a domain‐specific modeling language (DSML), the Communication Modeling Language (CML), that is used to create communication models, and a semantic rich platform, the CVM, that realized the created communication models. In this paper, we report on our experiences of applying a systematic approach to engineering CML and the synthesis of CML models in CVM. Based on a feature model describing the taxonomy of the user‐centric communication domain in a network independent manner, we develop the meta‐model of CML and its different concrete syntaxes. We also present a behavioral specification (dynamic semantics) of CML that enables the dynamic synthesis of user‐centric communication models into an executable form called communication control script. We validated the CML semantics using Kermeta, a meta‐programming environment for engineering DSMLs, and evaluated the practicality of our approach using a CVM prototype and a set of experiments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Rapid advances in electronic communication devices and technologies have resulted in a shift in the way communication applications are being developed. The emerging development strategies provide end-users with a greater ability to manipulate the underlying communication technologies by providing the appropriate level of abstraction, referred to as usercentric communication. In communication-intensive domains such as telemedicine and disaster management, the user-centric communication strategies still lack the ability to coordinate the various communication services in collaborative processes.In this paper, we present a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), Workflow Communication Modeling Language (WF-CML), that supports the rapid realization of collaborative user-centric communication applications. WF-CML is an extension of CML with communication specific abstractions of workflow concepts. To realize WF-CML models the dynamic synthesis process in the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) prototype was extended to coordinate the negotiation and media transfer processes based on events generated during the collaboration. We also present a comparative study to show the advantage of using WF-CML over a general-purpose workflow language and execution environment.

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