The Application-Based Domain Modeling Approach: Principles and Evaluation

Domain analysis provides guidelines and validation aids for specifying families of applications and capturing their terminology. Thus, domain analysis can be considered as an important type of reuse, validation, and knowledge representation. Metamodeling techniques, feature-oriented approaches, and architectural-based methods are used for analyzing domains and creating application artifacts in these domains. These works mainly focus on representing the domain knowledge and creating applications. However, they provide insufficient guidelines (if any) for creating complete application artifacts that satisfy the application requirements on one hand and the domain rules and constraints on the other hand. This chapter claims that domain artifacts may assist in creating complete and valid application artifacts and presents a general approach, called Application-based DOmain Modeling (ADOM), for this purpose. ADOM enables specifying domains and applications similarly, (re)using domain knowledge in applications, and validating applications against the relevant domain models and artifacts. The authors demonstrate the approach, which is supported by a CASE tool, on the standard modeling language, UML, and report experimental results which advocate that the availability of domain models may help achieve more complete application models without reducing the comprehension of these models.