Computer Science: Faculty Publications

A Domain-Specific Modeling Approach to Realizing User-centric Communication

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2012

Publication Title

Software: Practice and Experience

DOI

10.1002/spe.1081

ISSN

1097-024X

Abstract

Advances in communication devices and technologies are dramatically expanding our communication capabilities and enabling a wide range of multimedia communication applications. The current approach to develop communication-intensive applications results in products that are fragmented, inflexible, and incapable of responding to changing end-users' communication needs. These limitations have resulted in the need for a new development approach of building communication applications that are driven by end-users and that support the dynamic nature of communication-based collaboration. To address this need, the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology has been developed to support rapid specification and automatic realization of user-centric communication applications based on a domain-specific modeling approach. The CVM technology consists of a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), the Communication Modeling Language (CML), that is used to create communication models, and a semantic rich platform, the CVM, that realized the created communication models. In this paper, we report on our experiences of applying a systematic approach to engineering CML and the synthesis of CML models in CVM. Based on a feature model describing the taxonomy of the user-centric communication domain in a network independent manner, we develop the meta-model of CML and its different concrete syntaxes. We also present a behavioral specification (dynamic semantics) of CML that enables the dynamic synthesis of user-centric communication models into an executable form called communication control script. We validated the CML semantics using Kermeta, a meta-programming environment for engineering DSMLs, and evaluated the practicality of our approach using a CVM prototype and a set of experiments.

Copyright

This work is archived and distributed under the repository's Standard Copyright and Reuse License (opens in new tab). End users may copy, store, and distribute this work without restriction. For all other uses, permission must be obtained from the copyright owners or their authorized agents.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS