Domain analysis for GenVoca generators

There are many reasons why one may model a domain: improved documentation, enhanced understanding of applications, etc. The author has only one motivation for domain modeling-to design product line architectures so that customized systems can be built quickly and cheaply from components. His goal is to cast and encapsulate existing artifacts, domain knowledge, and domain specific implementation techniques into software components that reflect the fundamental building blocks of domain applications. Every domain is characterized by a small set of fundamental abstractions. Each abstraction is characterized by many different realizations, which can be recognized as consistent "refinements" of the abstraction. The output of a domain analysis that the author performs is a GenVoca domain model (D. Batory et al., 1995): a list of fundamental domain abstractions; a list of refinements for each abstraction that identifies basic ways in which the abstraction can be realized; a parametric model which defines the abstractions that are imported and exported by a refinement; and rules-preconditions/postconditions-that express how refinements can be legally composed. In GenVoca terminology, abstractions correspond to realms, refinements correspond to parametrized components, and composition constraints correspond to design rules (D. Batory, 1997).