General Object Model Transformation System

摘要

Cecil and Fullenkamp developed a program that transforms knowledge captured in anobject-model in one environment into a different object-model in a different environment. This program worked well for the intended purppose, but if one of the object-models is replaced by a different object-model then this transformation program has to be re-engineered. As the object-modeling paradigm becomes more prevalent, many systems are experiencing this problem. The primary goal of this research was to determine what reusable knowledge could be extracted from these types of program and used to build a general object-model transformer that generalizes such transformation programs. Toward this end, we analyzed several cases of object-model transformations, designed a generic version of an object-model transformer, and implemented and tested a prototype transformer. The research results provide an approach to analyzing the problem, designing a solution, and transformation templates for various aspects of a solution strategy. These results should be extremely beneficial to software engineers desigining object-model transformation systems.