CASE-Tool Interchange of Design Transformations

An Active Approach to Model Management for Evolving Information Systems

“…In an earlier paper [10] we have suggested an approach by which design transformations can be freely interchanged between tools. Transformations are represented using a conservative extension of the OCL language.…”

“…In order to support the specification of active OCL rules, it has been necessary to extend the OCL rule language beyond that suggested in our previous work [10] by the addition of a list of events that can trigger a transformation rule:…”

“…In order to achieve a high degree of interoperability this model has been kept as simple and as generic as possible, in contrast with, for example, the Microsoft Repository approach [3] that models transformations with proprietary and domain specific structures. A number of superclasses have been proposed previously [10] for this purpose in a non-active environment; these can be inherited by the other meta model classes. The only extension required is the addition of an event property to the rule class.…”

“…In order to support this type of behaviour for the active set of models it is necessary to extend OCL to allow the use of context variables in transformation rules. In earlier work [10], we introduced updates to the OCL language. In particular, the aliasing mechanism present in the OCL standard definition was used to allow new objects to be referenced, and thus be modified in different ways.…”