Typing Textual Entities and M2T/T2M Transformations in a Model Management Environment

Abstract

Global Model Management (GMM) is a model-based approach for managing large sets of interrelated heterogeneous and complex MDE artifacts. Such artifacts are usually represented as models, however as many Domain Specific Languages have a textual concrete syntax, GMM also supports textual entities and model-to-text/text-to-model transformations which are projectors that bridge the MDE technical space and the Grammarware technical space. As the transformations supported by GMM are executable artifacts, typing is critical for preventing type errors during execution. We proposed the cGMM calculus which formalizes the notion of typing in GMM. In this work, we extend cGMM with new types and rules for supporting textual entities and projectors. With such an extension, those artifacts may participate in transformation compositions addressing larger transformation problems. We illustrate the new constructs in the context of an interoperability case study.