Intensional View Definition with Constrained Incremental Transformation Rules
Résumé
Models of real-world systems can be extremely complex. In order to make such models amenable to engineering processes, multiple simpler views are typically defined that each cover a subset of the source model aspects. In such situations each of the views represents a subset of the information present in the source. However, some views actually contain information that is not present in their source. This information must be consistently populated. Most approaches, for instance based on model transformation, force the selection of a single target model. There is therefore a need to define views intensionally. The approach presented in this paper augments transformation rules with constraints, which can be used to intensionally specify which views are valid for a given source. Moreover, multiple distinct views can be defined from a single pre-existing underlying model. This approach is applied to a visual view case study consisting of a class diagram, and an object diagram built from a single underlying UML model.