Section: Overall Objectives

Previous Achievements

The team has progressively developed a conceptual modeling framework [39] [9] that is now well accepted in the scientific community. This provides a high-level view of MDE described in several research papers (e.g., [4] [5] [41] [43] [3] ). The iterative definition of this conceptual framework has been validated by the construction of several experimental concrete toolboxes. The first generation (sNets, based on semantic networks) was built in Smalltalk in the 90's [37] . The second one is the current AmmA (for AtlanMod Model Management Architecture) toolbox available in Eclipse. This is at the same time a research platform and an industrial toolbox. The AtlanMod team is working to deliver a new version of this toolbox more compact, more efficient, more usable, and more portable. The basic principles will be the same, but many simplifications and improvements will allow coping with more general situations.

One important result that was obtained in the previous period is the fact that MDE is a branch of language engineering. This was one of the outcomes of a Dagstuhl school that we co-organized in 2004 [38] . More precisely a metamodel is now usually considered as the definition of the abstract syntax of a language, usually a Domain Specific Language (DSL). This idea is central in the AmmA toolbox that may be viewed as a DSL building framework composed itself of a number of primitive DSLs. The four most known AmmA DSLs are KM3 (a DSL for metamodel specification), TCS (a DSL for textual syntaxes), ATL (a DSL for model transformation), and AMW (a DSL for representing model correspondences). All these mutually dependent tools are available under Eclipse.org (projects or components: M2M, ATL, TMF, MoDisco, AM3, AMW). They are currently in use in research, teaching, and industry and they have a broad user community.