M. Wimmer, A. Schauerhuber, W. Schwinger, H. Kargl: On the Integration of Web Modeling Languages: Preliminary Results and Future Challenges, 7th International Conference on Web Engineering, 3rd Workshop on Model-driven Web Engineering, Como, Italien, 16.07.2007 - 20.07.2007, in: 7th International Conference on Web Engineering, Workshop Proceedings, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, (2007), ISBN: 978-88-902405-2-2, pages 255 - 269. pdf
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is considered as the lingua franca in software engineering. Despite various web modeling languages having emerged in the past decade, in the field of web engineering a pendant to UML cannot be found yet. In the light of this “method war” the question arises if a unification of the existing web modeling languages can be successfully applied in the style of UML´s development. In such a unification effort we defer the task of designing a “Unified Web Modeling Language”. Instead, we first aim at integrating three prominent representatives of the web modeling field, namely WebML, UWE, and OO-H, in order to gain a detailed understanding of their commonalities and differences as well as to identify the common concepts used in web modeling. This integration is based on specifying transformation rules allowing the transformation of WebML, UWE, and OO-H models into any other of the three languages, respectively. To this end, a major contribution of this work is the languages´ definitions made explicit in terms of metamodels, a prerequisite for model-driven web engineering for each approach. Furthermore, the transformation rules defined between these metamodels – besides representing a step towards unification – also enable interoperability through model exchange.