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Vision Paper: The Essence of Structural Models

Vision Paper: The Essence of Structural Models
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Conference Paper: MODELS'11, October, 2011

Models should represent the essential aspects of a system and leave out the inessential details. In this paper we propose an automatic approach to determine whether a model indeed focuses on the essential aspects. We define a new metric, structural essence, that quantifies the fraction of essential elements in a model. Our approach targets structural models, such as the prevalent UML class diagrams. It is inspired by the idea of algorithmic essence – the amount of repetitive constructs in a program – and the duality between behavior and structure. We present a framework for computing the essence of a structural model based on a transformation of that model into a “distilled model” and on an existing graph algorithm operating on that distilled model. We discuss the meaning of our concept of structural essence based on a set of example models. We hope that our notion of structural essence will spark discussions on the purpose and the essence of models.

@incollection {springerlink:10.1007/978-3-642-24485-8_34, author = {Zaparanuks, Dmitrijs and Hauswirth, Matthias}, affiliation = {University of Lugano, Switzerland}, title = {Vision Paper: The Essence of Structural Models}, booktitle = {Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, editor = {Whittle, Jon and Clark, Tony and Kühne, Thomas}, publisher = {Springer Berlin / Heidelberg}, isbn = {978-3-642-24484-1}, keyword = {Computer Science}, pages = {470-479}, volume = {6981}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24485-8_34}, note = {10.1007/978-3-642-24485-8_34}, year = {2011} }