ModelML: a Markup Language for Automatic Model Synthesis

Domain-specific modeling has become a popular way of designing and developing systems. It generally involves a systematic use of a set of object-oriented models to represent various facets of a domain. However, manually creating instances of these models is time-consuming and error-prone when a system in the domain is complex. Automatic model synthesis tools are thus usually developed to free users from the model creation process. In practice, most of these tools would hard code knowledge about the domain specific models in the program. A biggest problem with these tools is that their source code needs to be changed whenever the knowledge changes. In this paper, we define a model markup language (ModelML) to facilitate the development of automatic model synthesis tools. The language provides a complete self-describing representation of object-oriented models to be synthesized. Unlike other XML-based representations of models, ModelML reflects the structure of the models directly in the nesting of elements in the XML-based syntax. This feature allows the knowledge about the domain specific models to be decoupled from model synthesis tools. To demonstrate the usefulness of the markup language, we have developed a generic automatic model synthesis tool which is based on ModelML inputs.