Combining DSLs and ontologies using metamodel integration

Abstract

This paper reports on a case study where the domain specific language BEDSL for the description of network devices for computer networks is combined with the feature description language FODA used for defining the variability structure of product lines. Furthermore, annotations by fragments of the web ontology language OWL can be added. In essence, the approach is a three-way integration, which regards two documents written in BEDSL and FODA, respectively, and semantic OWL-annotations as three equally important views of the system under discussion. The integration of languages is done on the level of their metamodels. The standard metamodel of OWL 2 is merged with two self-developed metamodels for the respective domain specific languages. The merge is loss-free, i.e. the resulting merged model still contains all information from its parts. Thus, the BEDSL part can be used to visualize the network model, the FODA part still defines the feature structure of the corresponding product line and the OWL part can be extracted and fed into an OWL tool to assert the semantic conditions. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.