VisTML: A Visual Modeling Language for Model Transformation

Recently model transformations quickly become large size and complex in structure. It is necessary to apply the modeling technique when developing transformations to manage the complexity. The paper proposes VisTML - a visual modeling language for model transformations. It provides six diagrams, which cover the whole lifecycle of transformation development and enable us to specify a transformation from various views and in different phases, i.e. the goal diagram, the transformation diagram, the rule diagram, the composition diagram, the test diagram, and the deployment diagram. We also provide a tool support and a real case of VisTML to illustrate the feasibility of VisTML. Besides, a comparison of VisTML, UML, and transML is presented at last.