Architecture Description Leveraging Model Driven Engineering and Semantic Wikis

A previous study, run by some of the authors in collaboration with practitioners, has emphasized the need to improve architectural languages in order to (i) make them simple and intuitive enough to communicate effectively with project stakeholders, and (ii) enable formality and rigour to allow analysis and other automated tasks. Although a multitude of languages have been created by researchers and practitioners, they rarely address both of these needs. In order to reconcile these divergent needs, this paper presents an approach that (i) combines the rigorous foundations of model-driven engineering with the usability of semantic wikis, and (ii) enables continuous syncronization between them, this allows software architects to simultaneously use wiki pages for communication and models for model-based analysis and manipulation. In this paper we explain how we applied the approach to an industry-inspired case study using the Semantic Media Wiki wiki engine and a model-driven architecture description implemented within the Eclipse Modeling Framework. We also discuss how our approach can be generalized to other wiki-based and model-driven technologies.