Defining and Controlling Modeling Processes
Résumé
Model driven approaches promote the wide use of models as first-time entities. Consequently domain specialists — not necessarily modeling specialists— have to express their requirements by building models using a metamodel, most often without any guidelines to help them. Because defining a model is not an easy task, it is necessary to assist such users in their modeling activities and to control how they could build models. Our proposal to address this issue is two-fold. First, we define incremental modeling processes where models are built step by step. Such a process is specified by a metamodel that is incrementaly defined, introducing new concepts only when they are relevant (metamodel refinement). Second, we define interactive model transformations using contracts in order to control how models can be built during each step. This paper presents our proposal and illustrates using an example how we provide modeling environments dedicated to a particular process.