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.