Invited speaker

Colin Atkinson - From Language Engineering to Viewpoint Engineering

As software systems increase in size and complexity, and are expected to cope with ever more quantities of information from ever more sources, there is an urgent and growing need for a more view-oriented approach to software engineering. Views allow stakeholders to see exactly the right information, at exactly the right time, in a way that best matches their capabilities and goals. However, this is only possible if the information is represented in the optimal languages (i.e. domain- and purpose-specific), with the necessary context information and the optimal manipulation/editing features - that is, if information is viewed from the optimal viewpoints. Rather than merely engineering languages, therefore, software engineers in the future will need to engineer viewpoints, which augment language definitions (e.g. meta-models, syntax …) with context information (e.g. elision, location, perspective …) and user-interaction information (e.g. editing pallets, view manipulation services …). In this talk Colin Atkinson will outline the issues faced in supporting the flexible and efficient engineering of viewpoints and will present some key foundations of a fundamentally view-oriented approach to software engineering.

Biography

Colin Atkinson has been the leader of the Software Engineering Group at the University of Mannheim since April 2003. Before that he has held positions at the University of Kaiserslautern, the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering and the University of Houston - Clear Lake. His research interests are focused on the use of model-driven and component based approaches in the development of dependable and adaptable computing systems. He was a contributor to the original UML development process and is one of the original developers of the deep (multi-level) approach to conceptual modelling. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science from Imperial College, London, in 1990 and 1985 respectively, and his B.Sc. in Mathematical Physics from the University of Nottingham 1983.