Re: [Orocos-users] [ANN] DNG - beyond deployment scripts

On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Piotr Trojanek wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 06:50:58PM +0100, Herman Bruyninckx wrote:
>> >>That was clarified a little bit later on in my message: what are really the
>> >>concepts we have to capture, what are their relationships, and how are they
>> >>constrained?
>> >
>> >In a hope to clarify even further: these are exactly the components of the
>> >'abstract syntax' of a domain-specific modelling language, as defined in [1].
>> 
>> Indeed. I consider both (DSL and metamodel) to coincide, whenever possible.
>> 
>> >This paper provides a few other interesting definitions, which maybe we could
>> >adopt on this mailing list...
>> 
>> Which ones exactly are you thinking of?
>
> Please excuse me for delayed reply. Definitions that I like in this paper are:
> - model: a formal structure representing selected aspects of the engineering
>  artifact and its environment (page 2).

I try to make this one step more concrete by a constructive definition:
- give the concepts in the model domain a name
- give the relationships between these concepts a name _and_ a structure
- optional (when applicable): give a name to the objective functions the
   domain provides or design trade-off
- define which constraints can act on concepts, primitives, and objective
   functions.
- define which tolerances a particular design can use.

> - modeling language: a five-tuple of concrete syntax, abstract syntax, semantic
>  domain, and semantic and syntactic mappings (page 4).
>
> What I do not like are the explanations of "metamodel" as:
> - "formal model of domain-specific modeling language" (page 1)
> - "concrete, formal specifications of DSML" (page 4).
>
> This suggests that model=specification (I do not agree).
I have no problem with this "equality".

>  Moreover, they
> describe fig. 3 as "metamodel" -- this is clearly wrong, because there is only
> an abstract syntax in that figure, i.e. concepts, relationships and integrity
> constraints.

So, they miss the reference to the ontology/semantics of the concepts,
relationships, and constraints. This is rather "obvious", isn't it?

> It seems that even experts mix two different meanings of the term "metamodel":
> 1. modelling language (including syntax, semantics and notation)
> 2. abstract syntax of a DSML (formalized more as a graph than as a tree).

How and why then exactly do you differentiate both?

>> Your suggestion is very valid, but then we are now focusing on the
>> metametamodel discussion first :-)
>> >
>> >[1] G. Karsai, J. Sztipanovits, A. Ledeczi, and T. Bapty. Model-integrated
>> >development of embedded software. Proceedings of the IEEE, 91(1):145–164, 2003.
>> 
>> Thanks for this reference! I am now taking a look at all articles in the
>> special issue that this article appeared in.
>
> Thank you for pointing to other gems hidden inside this issue!

>> >Piotr Trojanek

Herman

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