Towards Active Participation of Domain Experts in Modeling Language Evolution

The evolution of domain-specific modeling languages is crucial for maintaining their relevance and effectiveness as systems and requirements evolve. Typically, this process requires collaboration between domain experts and developers, but it often faces misunderstandings, misaligned goals, and communication barriers. These challenges can lead to language evolution misaligned with domain experts' intentions, stemming from their limited participation due to a lack of technical skills. Participatory modeling practices can mitigate these issues by involving domain experts throughout the entire language evolution process. We propose advancing to the self-mobilization level of participatory modeling, enabling domain experts to independently drive language evolution. This advancement requires tools that eliminate the need for technical metamodeling expertise. In this vision paper, we describe MetaMorph, a tool aimed to support domain experts in achieving self-mobilization in the evolution of domain-specific modeling languages. MetaMorph allows domain experts to specify changes to the underlying metamodel through existing model instances, providing instant feedback on the resulting evolved model. It also supports the automatic evolution and co-evolution of metamodels and models. MetaMorph aims to minimize the risk of inappropriate language evolution, accelerate the overall process, and enhance the adoption and acceptance of evolved languages.