A MDA Approach to Model & Implement Transformations

Abstract

Only in software and in linguistics a model has the same
nature as the thing it models. In software at least, this opens the possibility
to automatically derive software from its model. This property is
well known from any compiler writer (and others), but it was recently be
made quite popular with an OMG initiative called the Model Driven Architecture
(MDA). The model transformations allowing the engineers to
more or less automatically go from platform-independent models (PIM)
to platform-specific models (PSM) are increasingly seen as vital assets
that must be managed with sound software engineering principles. We
believe that transformations should be first-class models in the MDA
world; we propose to adopt the object-oriented approach and to leverage
the expressive power of UML as a metamodel defining the transformation
language.