Symbiotic general-purpose and domain-specific languages

Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) have received great attention in recent years and are expected to play a big role in the future of software engineering as processes become more view-centric. However, they are a “two-edged sword”. While they provide strong support for communication within communities, allowing experts to express themselves using concepts tailored to their exact needs, they are a poor vehicle for communication across communities because of their lack of common, transcending concepts. In contrast, General-Purpose Modeling Languages (GPMLs) have the opposite problem - they are poor at the former but good at the latter. The value of models in software engineering would therefore be significantly boosted if the advantages of DSMLs and GPMLs could be combined and models could be viewed in a domain-specific or general-purpose way depending on the needs of the user. In this paper we present an approach for achieving such a synergy based on the orthogonal classification architecture. In this architecture model elements have two classifiers: a linguistic one representing their “general-purpose” and an ontological one representing their “domain-specific” type. By associating visualization symbols with both classifiers it is possible to support two concrete syntaxes at the same time and allow the domain-specific and general-purpose notation to support each other - that is, to form a symbiotic relationship.