Adding flexibility in the model-driven engineering of user interfaces

Model-based user interface (UI) development environments are aimed at generating one or many UIs from a single model or a family of models. Model-driven engineering (MDE) of UIs is assumed to be superior to those environments since they make the UI design knowledge visible, explicit, and external, for instance as model-to-model transformations and model-to-code compilation rules. These transformations and rules are often considered inflexible, complex to express, and hard to develop by UI designers and developers who are not necessarily experts in MDE. In order to overcome these shortcomings, this work introduces the concept of transformation profile that consists of two definitions: model mappings, which connect source and target models in a flexible way, and transformation templates, which gather high-level parameters to apply to transformations. This work applies these concepts in a general-purpose method for MDE of information systems. Transformation profiles can be effectively and efficiently used in any circumstances in which transformation knowledge needs to be modified by non-experts, and flexibility, modifiability, and customization are required