A Metamodel Family for Role-Based Modeling and Programming Languages

Abstract

Abstract. Role-based modeling has been proposed almost 40 years ago as a means to model complex and dynamic domains, because roles are able to capture both context-dependent and collaborative behavior of objects. Unfortunately, while several researchers have introduced the notion of roles to modeling and programming languages, only few have captured both the relational and the context-dependent nature of roles. In this work, we classify various proposals since 2000 and show the discontinuity and fragmentation of the whole research field. To overcome discontinuity, we propose a family of metamodels for role-based modeling languages. Each family member corresponds to a design decision captured in a feature model. In this way, it becomes feasible to generate a metamodel for each role-based approach. This allows for the combination and improvement of the different role-based modeling and programming languages and paves the way to reconcile the research field.

Enabling View-based Programming with SCROLL

“…This indicates that the SCROLL approach is also very useful for modeling languages, because it requires a minimal set of features from the language, and nevertheless, provides hierarchical views. And finally, some modeling environments, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), already provide dynamic proxies, on which dynamic [31,42]. It differentiates between fully ( ), partly ( ) and not supported ( ) features.…”

“…On top of that, the following additional features of roles w.r.t. their context-dependent nature are extracted from [31]. All features are enumerated more compactly in Fig.…”

“…1 Therefore, we argue that it is necessary to establish the basic concepts of roles (views) and contexts (viewpoints) with an appropriate light-weight tooling, available in a major programming platform so that view-based programming becomes available for the masses. Such a lightweight approach is also beneficial to support different shades of the meaning of roles and contexts [31], because it can be adapted easily by an expert programmer or language engineer.…”

Continuous model validation using reference attribute grammars

“…Closing the loop, Jäkel et al [20] extended SQL adding relationships to perform queries upon compartment role object models [24]. For a detailed survey the reader is referred to [25,36].…”

Adaptive Exchange of Distributed Partial Models@run.time for Highly Dynamic Systems

“…Role-oriented modeling, originally introduced by Bachman in 1973 [9], is an alternative, which provides means to capture the contextual and relational nature of objects, i.e., allows one to model self-and context-aware software [10].…”