Reverse Modeling for Domain-Driven Engineering of Publishing Technology
Anne Brüggemann-Klein, Tamer Demirel, Dennis Pagano, Andreas Tai · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2010
We report in this paper on a technique that we call reverse modeling. Reverse modeling starts with a conceptual model that is formulated in one or more generic modeling technologies such as UML or XML Schema. It abstracts from that model a custom, domain-specific meta-model and re-formulates the original model as an instance of the new meta-model. We demonstrate the value of reverse modeling with two case studies: One domain-specific meta-model facilitates design and user interface of a so-called instance generator for broadcasting productions metadata. Another one structures the translation of XML-encoded printer data for invoices into semantic XML. In a further section of this paper, we take a more general view and survey patterns that have evolved in the conceptual modeling of documents and data and that implicitly suggest sound meta-modeling constructs. Taken together, the two case studies and the survey of patterns in conceptual models bring us one step closer to our superior goal of developing a meta-meta-modeling facility whose instances are custom meta-models for conceptual document and data models. The research that is presented in this paper brings forward a core set of elementary constructors that a meta-meta-modeling facility should provide.