Graph Transformations for Evolving Domain Knowledge

Graph transformation (GraTra) systems have been used for building tools in a wide spectrum of application domains. A GraTra system constitutes an operational specification which may be either interpreted directly or compiled into executable code. The specification incorporates domain knowledge concerning types of objects, operations to be performed, and patterns to be instantiated. In many applications, domain knowledge is not fixed; rather, it evolves while the tool based on the specification is being used. We examine and compare different approaches to support evolving domain knowledge which were developed in several projects in different domains. Our work may be viewed as a step towards engineering of GraTra Systems for evolving domain knowledge — a topic of practical relevance which has not gained sufficient attention so far. Although the examples regarded in this paper have been formulated in PROGRES [26], the arguments and results hold for other GraTra systems, as well.

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