On Formalizing EMF Modeling Operations with Graph Transformations

The development of software in accordance with the model-driven engineering paradigm places model transformations at a central position. Desirable yet contradicting properties of model transformations are user-friendliness as offered by by-demonstration approaches and formal conciseness as provided by algebraic graph transformations which is indispensable for verification tasks. In this paper, we show how to unite the properties of the two different approaches. We employ the state-of-the-art by-demonstration environment EMO to prototype graph transformations by embedding the operations obtained from EMO in the formal framework of graph transformation theory.