AToM3

I am back from vacation and continue reporting about the seminar talks. On 29.11.07 we discussed the tool AToM3, a research project of Hans Vangheluwe and Juan de Lara.

AToM3 is an acronym for "A Tool for Multi-formalism and Meta-Modelling". From my point of view its main features are:

• meta CASE-tool: specify a visual language (formalism) and generate an environment


• homogeneous view on metamodelling: define models in a particular formalism and use them directly as a formalism again, for instance, a petri net formalism can be defined using the ER (entity relationship) formalism and in the following real petri nets can be drawn; most of AToM3 can be bootstrapped (even user interaction)


• model transformations: internally models are represented as graphs, graph grammars can be defined and used for model transformation

AToM3 is a very interesting research tool. There are a lot of publications discussing particular aspects of the tool and its theoretical foundations. However, it seems not to be ready for production settings yet. Parts of the documentation are outdated and even the Hello-World example caused several exceptions (but I got it up and running) and useless warnings like "Bad things will happen". However, as a researcher in the area of graph transformation you have to deal with the tool or at least with the publications by all means.

Further reading:

• AToM3 website


• AToM3 publications


• AToM3, some more publications