Model-Driven Engineering is on its way to become the new software development paradigm, where model transformations are considered
as a key technology to close the gap between specification and implementation. Several model transformation approaches and
corresponding languages have been developed in the past years. Most of these approaches are metamodel-based, thus require
knowledge of implementation details of modeling languages, which in contrast is not necessary for defining domain models in
their concrete syntax. Therefore, Model Transformation By-Example (MTBE) approaches have been proposed for defining mappings
between domain models from which model transformations are derived. However, until today no tool support for MTBE has been
developed.
The contribution of this paper is the presentation of MTBE concepts necessary for deriving general model transformations based
on metamodels from user-defined mappings between example models. More specifically, we describe a model mapping language and
a metamodel mapping language, as well as reasoning algorithms to infer metamodel mappings from model mappings. Furthermore,
we report on how MTBE concepts have been integrated into existing state-of-the-art graphical modeling and model transformation
frameworks and give a critical discussion based on a case study.
Keywords model transformation - mapping language - GMF - concrete syntax
This work has been partly funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) and FFG
under grant FIT-IT-810806.0.