Advances in modeling language engineering

Abstract

The increasing complexity of modern systems development demands for specific modeling languages capturing the various aspects to be tackled. However, engineering of comfortable modeling languages as well as their tooling is a challenging endeavor. Far too often, new languages are built from scratch. We shed light into the advances of modeling language engineering that facilitates reuse, modularity, compositionality and derivation of new languages based on language components. We discuss ways to design, combine, and derive modeling languages in all their relevant aspects. For each of these activities, we illustrate their application for the model-driven development of a data exploration tool. The tool itself uses a set of meta-information, namely the structural model to derive all necessary software components that help to gather, store, visualize and navigate the data.