Formal Language Design in the Context of Domain Engineering

摘要

Even though many domain specific languages have been implemented, there is a lack of well defined methods available for both analyzing domains with the intent of creating a domain specific language and developing the domains specific languages. The research presented in this thesis aims at this problem by capturing, analyzing and merging two methods that define domain engineering processes. Initial analysis of the methods indicated that they have complementary strengths. Therefore, merging the two methods promises to produce a more robust method. Will the integration of two domain engineering methods - one which has a mature domain analysis phase, and one which has a well studied method for developing domain specific languages given an appropriate domain analysis - produce such a complete formal domain engineering method. It is the thesis of this research that integrating the key features of each method will indeed produce a more robust method. Capturing the two methods involves studying documents describing the processes as well as obtaining additional information from experts on the techniques of the methods. Capturing the definition of the methods and validating these definitions with experts is essential to ensure that the process is correctly understood. For one of the methods much additional work has to be done to synthesize information from the method experts, as the definition of the method is not well documented or agreed upon.