Systematically deriving domain-specific transformation languages

Model transformations are helpful to evolve, refactor, refine and maintain models. While domain-specific languages are normally intuitive for modelers, common model transformation approaches (regardless of whether they transform graphical or textual models) are based on the modeling language´s abstract syntax requiring the modeler to learn the internal representation of the model to describe transformations. This paper presents a process that allows to systematically derive a textual domain-specific transformation language from the grammar of a given textual modeling language. As example, we apply this systematic derivation to UML class diagrams to obtain a domain-specific transformation language called CDTrans. CDTrans incorporates the concrete syntax of class diagrams which is already familiar to the modeler and extends it with a few transformation operators. To demonstrate the usefulness of the derived transformation language, we describe several refactoring transformations.