Modeling Language Variability

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal approach to defining and reasoning about variability in modeling languages, enabling systematic adaptation to specific domains through semantic refinements.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework for modeling language variability and the concept of semantic language refinement to compare language variants.

Findings

Formal semantics for language variants established

Semantic refinement relation defined and analyzed

Framework supports reasoning about language customization

Abstract

A systematic way of defining variants of a modeling language is useful for adopting the language to domain or project specific needs. Variants can be obtained by adopting the syntax or semantics of the language. In this paper, we take a formal approach to define modeling language variability and show how this helps to reason about language variants, models, and their semantics formally. We introduce the notion of semantic language refinement meaning that one semantics variant is implied by another.