Session Title Knowledge Industry Survival Strategy (KISS)

Session Type Workshop
Duration 360 minutes
Session Description

In order to increase awareness about the role that domain specific modelling languages can play in capturing, preserving, and exploiting knowledge in virtually all industries, it is necessary to establish a strong consensus on the fundamental values and principles that underpin the use of domain specific modelling languages.

The message about domain specific modelling languages needs to be clear, hype-free, and based on a foundation that reflects the reality of software intensive industries today. The signatories of the KISS initiative propose to start with a small and sound common denominator that can not easily be misused by tool vendors.

The KISS series of conference workshops and related events is used to incrementally create a consensus that can be expressed in a form similar to the agile manifesto and the fundamental agile principles.

Objectives

  1. Reaching a strong consensus on fundamental values and principles for designing and using Domain Specific Languages
  2. Progress towards interoperability between tools

Topics of Interest

  • Fundamental values and principles for designing and using domain specific modeling languages (DSMLs)
  • Classification of the different kinds of DSML tool components, and the artifacts created and exchanged between DSML tool components
  • Descriptions of existing or planned industrial projects that illustrate the need for improved DSML tool interoperability
  • Evaluations of existing meta meta model implementations, comparisons of meta meta model implementations, and proposals of new meta meta models that are conducive for improving DSML tool interoperability
  • Proposals for useful levels of DSML tool interoperability
  • Case studies of attempts (successful or not) to increase interoperability between two or more DSML tools
  • Concrete tool interoperability requirements from organizations that use DSMLs
  • Building an open community that owns interoperability standards for DSML tools
  • Approaches that can be used for practical certification of tools with respect to interoperability levels

Submissions

Potential participants are encouraged to submit a two-page (or longer) position paper detailing their experience with domain specific modelling languages, their perspective on one or more of the above topics, and their planned contribution to the workshop. We seek contributions that ground the workshop in real-world issues. All accepted position papers will be published on the workshop home page prior to the workshop, and the participants are encouraged to read the papers prior to the workshop.

Please mail your submission (in PDF or Word) to Jorn Bettin (jbe at sofismo dot ch).

Expected number of participants: 20
Cut-off point: 15 position papers, multiple authors per paper allowed. If more high quality submissions are received, the organizers may encourage submitters of papers on closely related topics to collaborate on a joint position paper.

Important Dates

Date Details
15 June 2009 Submission of short position papers (extended deadline)
16 June 2009 Workshop at CG 2009

Speaker(s) Jorn Bettin (Sofismo)
Jorn Bettin is a co-founder of Sofismo in Switzerland and of SoftMetaWare in New Zealand. Besides developing model related software assets, Jorn advises software start-ups, fast growing companies in software intensive industries, and large financial institutions. He is convinced that developing domain specific languages can only become popular if the best tooling for language design and implementation is available as Open Source software. Jorn sees models as the only viable mechanism to capture deep domain expertise in a form that is accessible to future generations of software professionals and software tools. He has worked in methodology leadership roles in an IBM product development lab, initiated the Eclipse Generative Modeling Tools project, and - back in 1994/5 - led the development of LANSA/RUOM, a widely used model driven CASE tool for the IBM iSeries platform.
Tony Clark (Thames Valley University)
Tony Clark worked for Marconi Research Ltd from 1985 to 1994 on advanced information systems for defence and aerospace applications. During this time he was one of the main designers of a tools for developing Expert Systems that was turned into a product and sold by a 3rd party software company under licence from Marconi from 1988 until 1991. Tony was also the technical lead on projects that developed novel applications for underwater sonar and visual surveillance systems. From 1994 to 2003 Tony worked as a lecturer at Bradford and then Kings College London. During this time Tony worked on developing software modelling techniques. As part of a group of academics from York, Kings and Kent, this work regularly participated (2000 - 2004) in the Object Management Group (OMG). This work produced a contribution that influenced the UML 2.0 standard. During this time Tony worked as a consultant with companies including Tata, IBM and Compuware. In 2003 Tony co-founded the company Xactium Ltd. That was spun out of research at Kings and York to develop and productise the tools to support the modelling work developed as part of the OMG contributions. Tony served as the Technical Director of Xactium from 2003 - 2008 and led many projects including customer consultancy and product R&D. Clients of Xactium included: British Aerospace Systems; CitiGroup; BT; BSkyB. In 2008 Tony returned to Academia as a Professor in Computing at Thames Valley University and has recently established the Research Centre for Model Driven Software in the School of Computing. He has published widely in the modelling field and is the main author of an influential book on meta-modelling. See http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~clark/ for more details.

Intended Audience