Modelitis, or, everything you always wanted to know about modeling

A couple of years ago I left the world of industrial software projects, and joined the academic world of computer science. I already had used models, I knew quite a few things about UML, even had programmed a graphical UML editor using GEF, in other words, I felt prepared to explore the universe of modeling. However, as my former boss and tutor Prof. Dr. Hans-Werner Six correctly diagnosed, I soon got infected with a terrible illness, widely spread in that area: modelitis. Actually, depending on how hard this disease hits you, you may call it meta-modelitis.

A special characteristic of this disease is that the patient himself is more or less unaware of it, actually, he or she often thinks it's great fun. So did I, and frankly, I doubt that I will ever be completely cured -- particularly since there are so many other victims of modelitis doing great and funny things. E.g.,  inventing one TLA (for non-modelitis afflicted readers: three letter acronym) after the other, such as MDA, MDD, DSL, MOF, ATL, EMF, ETL, GEF, GMF, OCL -- you name it. I was no better, I even tried certain variations, such as CAT, GEF3D, or Mitra (my own M2M-transformation language).

In the end, I wrote a book about my modelitis. It's title is

"Computerunterstützte Modelltransformationen. Modellierungstheorie, Konzeption und Visualisierung im Rahmen modellgetriebener Entwicklungsverfahren"

Yeah, it's a rather long title, and you can figure from its length that it's a real hard-core academic work (aka dissertation). Translated to english it's

"Computer-assisted transformations. Modeling theory, design and visualization in the context of model-driven development"

You may have noticed that "computer-assisted transformation" is abbreviated to CAT :-) This is the abstract of my thesis (in english, the thesis itself is written in german):

In the context of model driven development, fully automated model transformations are used to release developers from recurring and error-prone tasks, thus improving efficiency. However, these transformations cannot always be applied, or at least not without introducing new problems. By exploring semi-automated techniques, this work tries to eliminate some of these problems while preserving the positive effects. First, a modeling theory is developed for describing model driven approaches. This theory is used to analyze a typical problem of these approaches, the so called "semantic gap". The need to add semantics when transforming models is identified as a fundamental problem. Computer-assisted transformations are a semi-automated approach, which allow to combine manual transformation parts with automated parts. In order to define and execute this kind of transformations, a model-to-model transformation language called Mitra is designed. Due to the manual nature the approach, the models need to be visualized and a user- interface is to be provided. The basic idea of the proposed solution is the visualization of graphical models by means of two-dimensional diagrams projected onto planes in a three-dimensional scene. This permits not only the visualization of inter-model relations, but also semi-automated transformation of model elements with computer-assisted transformations employing the common drag-and-drop interaction pattern. With GEF3D, a framework is presented, which enables the combination of existing graphical editors in a three-dimensional scene. Three well-known transformation problems, among others the robustness analysis, are solved with the created tools in order to evaluate the proposed concepts.

If you are suffering modelitis as well, or if you are a otherwise seriously addicted to meta-modelling, you may download the PDF at the library of the FernUniversität in Hagen. If you want to look at some results, you may have a look at GEF3D, or at Mitra2. The latter is work in progress, as I'm currently migrating from Xtext 1.x to Xtext 2.x (the need for migrating from one version to another is one of the symptoms of modelitis, e.g., victims will enthusiastically tell you how they migrated their models from UML 1.x to UML 2.x ;-) ).

Since I doubt that too many of you will actually download and read the PDF, I will only repeat a snippet from my acknowledgement section:

 A big thank you to the Eclipse community! 

Without the great software, particularly in the modeling project, and without the great support (when I had problems with the great software ;-) ), I wouldn't had been able to actually implement software realizing my ideas and by that proof the concepts. And it wouldn't had been so much fun.

(All pictures taken from the dissertation)