Models are used widely within software engineering and have been studied from many perspectives. A perspective that has received little attention is the role of modeler intent in modeling. Knowing the intent of the modeler supports both model comprehension by providing the correct context for interpreting the model and model quality by clearly defining what information the model must contain. Furthermore, formal expressions of this intent allow automated support for this. Despite the value that the knowledge of modeler intent can provide, there are no adequate means in the current state of modeling practice for expressing this information. The focus of this thesis is to address this gap by providing mechanisms for expressing modeler intent both explicitly and formally.
We approach this problem by recognizing the existence of a role level in modeling where the role each model plays defines what information it should contain and how this is related to the information in other models. The specification of these roles is what we refer to as the expression of modeler intent. We then present a framework that incorporates four aspects of modeler intent at the role level: the existential intent for a model that arises in response to the need for a set of information by stakeholders, the content criteria that express what information the model is intended to contain, model relationships that express how models are intended to constrain one another and the decomposition criteria that express the intent behind how a model is decomposed into a collection of models. A key contribution of this thesis is the specification of the macromodeling language as a new modeling language designed for the role level that supports the expression of all four aspects of modeler intent. We evaluate these techniques by applying them to two real-world modeling examples.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/26232 |
| Date | 17 February 2011 |
| Creators | Salay, Richard |
| Contributors | Mylopoulos, John, Easterbrook, Steve |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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