SLE 2013 - The 6th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE)

The 6th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) is devoted to topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE's mission is to encourage and organize communication among communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different and yet complementary perspectives. Of particular relevance to SLE are technologies, methods, experiments, and case studies on software languages from researchers and practitioners who use modeling, grammar, or ontology-based approaches. Research that bridges, connects and integrates such approaches is particularly welcome.
The term "software language" refers to artificial languages used in software development. These include general-purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages, modeling and metamodeling languages, data models and ontologies. Examples include general purpose modeling languages such as SysML and UML, metamodeling frameworks such as Ecore, MOF or GOPRR, domain-specific modeling languages for business process modeling, such as BPMN, or embedded systems, such as Simulink or Modelica, and specialized XML-based and OWL-based languages and vocabularies. The term "software language" is intentionally broad; besides the above categories and examples, it also encompasses implicit approaches to language definition, such as APIs and collections of design patterns.
Software language engineering is the application of systematic, disciplined, and measurable approaches to the development (design, implementation, testing, deployment), use, deployment, and maintenance (evolution, recovery, and retirement) of these languages. Of special interest are (1) formal descriptions of languages that are used to design or generate language-based tools and (2) methods and tools for managing such descriptions, including modularization, refactoring, refinement, composition, versioning, co-evolution, recovery, and analysis.
We solicit high-quality contributions in the area of SLE ranging from theoretical and conceptual contributions to tools, techniques, and frameworks that support the aforementioned lifecycle activities. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
Formalisms used in designing and specifying languages, and tools that analyze language descriptions
Language implementation techniques: compiler generator tools, attribute grammar systems, term-rewriting systems, functional programming-based combinator libraries; metamodel-based and ontology tools implementing constraint, rule, view, transformation, and query formalisms and engines.
Transformations and transformation languages, as well as program and model transformation tools, and approaches for mapping between ontologies.
Language evolution: Included are extensible languages and type systems and their supporting tools and language conversion tools, approaches for ontology evolution, approaches for impact analysis of language evolution.
Approaches to the elicitation, specification, and verification of requirements for software languages: Examples include the use of requirements engineering techniques in domain engineering and in the development of domain-specific languages and the application of logic-based formalisms for verifying language and domain requirements.
Language development frameworks, methodologies, techniques, best practices, and tools for the broader language lifecycle covering phases such as analysis, testing, and documentation. For example, frameworks for advanced type or reasoning systems, constraint mechanisms, tools for metrics collection and language usage analysis, assessing language usability, documentation generators, visualization backends, generation of tests for language-based tools, knowledge and process management approaches, as well as IDE support for many of these activities are of interest.
Integration and interoperation between different approaches to software language engineering; for example, ways to integrate grammar-based and ontology-based approaches to language definition.
Design challenges in SLE: Example challenges include finding a balance between specificity and generality in designing domain-specific languages, between strong static typing and weaker yet more flexible type systems, or between deep and shallow embedding approaches, as, for example, in the context of adding type-safe XML and database programming support to general-purpose programming languages.
Applications of languages including innovative domain-specific languages or "little" languages: Examples include policy languages for security or service-oriented architectures, web-engineering with schema-based generators or ontology-based annotations. Of specific interest are the engineering aspects of domain-specific language support in all of these cases.
The program committee chairs encourage potential contributors to contact them with questions about the scope and topics of interest of SLE. The overall principle of SLE is to be broad-minded and inclusive about relevance and scope, and to invest in community building when soliciting and selecting papers.