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VM*: A Family of Visual Model Manipulation Languages

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Process Querying Methods

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Abstract

Context: Practical facilities for querying, constraining, and transforming models (“model management”) can significantly improve the utility of models, and modeling. Many approaches to model management, however, are very restricted, thus diminishing their utility: they support only few use cases, model types or languages, or burden users to learn complex concepts, notations, and tools.

Goal: We envision model management as a commodity, available with little effort to every modeler, and applicable to a wide range of use cases, modeling environments, and notations. We aim to achieve this by reusing the notation for modeling as a notation for expressing queries, constraints, and transformations.

Method: We present the VM* family of languages for model management. In support of our claim that VM* lives up to our vision we provide as evidence a string of conceptual explorations, prototype implementations, and empirical evaluations carried out over the previous twelve years.

Results: VM* is viable for many modeling languages, use cases, and tools. Experimental comparison of VM* with several other model querying languages has demonstrated that VM* is an improvement in terms of understandability. On the downside, VM* has limits regarding its expressiveness and computational complexity.

Conclusions: We conclude that VM* largely lives up to its claim, although the final proof would require a commercial implementation, and a large-scale industrial application study, both of which are beyond our reach at this point.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. QAware GmbH, München, Germany

    Harald Störrle

  2. FREQUENTIS Romania SRL, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Vlad Acreţoaie

Authors
  1. Harald Störrle
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  2. Vlad Acreţoaie
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Correspondence to Harald Störrle .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Artem Polyvyanyy

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Störrle, H., Acreţoaie, V. (2022). VM*: A Family of Visual Model Manipulation Languages. In: Polyvyanyy, A. (eds) Process Querying Methods. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92875-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92875-9_6

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