A projection-based approach for development of domain-specific languages

Abstract

The article is related to the problem of sustainable flexibility of a domain-specific language (DSL) in response to evolution of the application domain and users’ capabilities. We offer a solution of that problem based on a particular model-driven approach. We propose to create a DSL structure from the domain-semantic-model (DSM) through the so-called semantic projection mechanism. The semantic projection is an operation, which is conducted over DSM. The result of the projection is a fragment of DSM, which describes the semantic model of a particular DSL dialect. We suggest to apply a group of model-to-model (M2M) transformations for practical implementation of semantic projections and producing corresponding DSL artefacts. We demonstrate the application of the proposed approach by the example in railway allocation domain.