T. Mayerhofer, P. Langer, M. Wimmer: Towards xMOF: Executable DSMLs based on fUML, 12th Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM'12), Tucson, 22.10.2012; in Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM'12), ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012), ISBN: 978-1-4503-1634-7, pages 1 - 6. Doi: 10.1145/2420918.2420920
When defining a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), the two key components that have to be specified are its syntax and semantics. For specifying a modeling language´s abstract syntax, metamodels are the standard means. MOF provides a standardized, well established, and widely accepted metamodeling language enabling the definition of metamodels and the generation of accompanying modeling facilities. However, no such standard means exist for specifying the behavioral semantics of a DSML. This hampers the efficient development of model execution facilities, such as debugging, simulation, and verification. To overcome this limitation, we propose to integrate fUML with MOF to enable
the specification of the behavioral semantics for DSMLs in terms of fUML activities. We discuss alternatives how this integration can be achieved and show by-example how to specify the semantics of a DSML using fUML. To reuse existing runtime infrastructures, we further demonstrate the usage of external libraries in fUML-based specifications.