Knowledge industry survival strategy (KISS): fundamental principles and interoperability requirements for domain specific modeling languages

Domain Specific Languages are raising the level of abstraction of software specifications and of knowledge represen-tation in general. When DSLs are used to formalize the results of domain analysis, the result is a clean separation of concerns in the problem space. This is a major advance over aspect oriented programming, where separation of concerns is only achieved in the solution space. However, the level of interoperability between current DSL tools is comparable to the level of interoperability between CASE tools in the 90s. To increase the popularity of DSL based approaches, this needs to change. Software development has become highly decentralized, and an assumption that all parties in a global software supply chain will use identical tooling is simply not realistic. As a result today's software supply chains are much less automated than supply chains in other, more mature industries. The KISS series of workshops is used to incrementally establish a consensus on the fundamental principles that underpin the use of DSLs, and to improve DSL tool interoperability.