A Domain-Specific Visual Language for Domain Model Evolution

Domain-specific visual languages (DSVLs) are concise and useful tools that allow the rapid development of the behavior and/or structure of applications in well-defined domains. These languages are typically developed specifically for a domain, and have a strong cohesion to the domain concepts, which often appear as primitives in the language. The strong cohesion between DSVL language primitives and the domain is a benefit for development by domain experts, but can be a drawback when the domain evolves—even when that evolution appears to be insignificant. This paper presents a domain-specific visual language developed expressly for the evolution of domain-specific visual languages, and uses concepts from graph rewriting to specify and carry out the transformation of the models built using the original DSVL.