Domain-specific modeling in document engineering

Abstract

Specification languages play a central role in supporting document engineering. We describe in this paper how domain-specific languages, along with domain-specific frameworks and generators, can support formal specification and document rendering in directory publishing. With flexible metamodel-based tools we have developed four languages for the modeling of: (i) small advertisements, (ii) appropriate documents, (iii) workflow control and (iv) layout patterns. The paper provides a more detailed description of the first and the third language, including a brief account of the language interpreter, as well as code, document and application generators. The presented approach enables, in a typical document-centric system, specification of both static and dynamic characteristics of the system on a high abstraction level with domain-specific concepts. The concepts of incremental document specification and incremental document rendering have been introduced, in order to address the problem of very frequent specification(s) refinements. The expression power of the created languages is demonstrated with a representative examples of document engineering covering document content specification, workflow control and application generation. All of the aforementioned languages are integrated into a single meta-model, under the name of DVDocLang which is, due to its simplicity, highly applicable for user-driven conceptual modeling.