Resources Events Agents (REA), a text DSL for OMNIA Entities

• Autor(a) principal: Mata, Manuel Paulo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/12685
• topic: REA; DSL; Meta-Modeling; MDE; DSRM; OMNIA; Software

The Numbersbelieve has been developing the OMNIA platform. This is a web application platform for developing applications using Low-code principles, using Agile approaches. Modeling Entities is an application that is used on the platform to create new entities. The OMNIA Entity concept has the following properties: Agents, Commitments, Documents, Events, entities, Resources or Series. Most of these concepts are in accordance with the Resources Events Agents (REA) ontology but are not formalized. One of the goals of Numbersbelieve is a formalization of the REA concepts according to the ontology for the application that creates entities on OMNIA platform and later for other applications. REA defines an enterprise ontology developed by McCarthy (1979, 1982) has its origin in accounting database systems. Later Geerts and McCarthy (2002, 2006) extended the original model with new concepts. To formalize the concepts of the REA ontology, this research shows the development of a textual Domain-Specific Language (DSL) based on the development methodology Model Driven Engineering (MDE) which focuses software development on models. This simplifies the engineering processes as it represents the actions and behaviors of a system even before the start of the coding phase. This research is structured according to the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). The Design Science (DS) is a methodology for solving problems that seek to innovate by creating useful artifacts that define practices, projects and implementations and is therefore suitable for this research. This research developed three artifacts for the formalization of the DSL, a meta-model the abstract syntax, a textual language the concrete syntax and a Json file for interaction with OMNIA. The first phase of DSRM was to identify the problem that was mentioned above. The following focuses on the identification of requirements which identified the REA concepts to be included in the meta-model and textual language. Subsequently, the development of the artifacts and the editor of the language. The editor allows use cases, provided by the Numbersbelieve team, to be defined with the DSL language, correct faults and improve the language. The results were evaluated according the objectives and requirements, all successfully completed. Based on the analysis of the artifacts, the use of the language and the interaction with the OMNIA platform, through the Json file, it is concluded that the use of the DSL language is suitable to interact with the OMNIA platform through the Application Program Interface (API) and helped demonstrate that other applications on the platform could be modeled using a REA approach.