CS846 Paper Review Form - Winter 2012

Reviewer: Philip Mitchell

Paper Title: A Systematic Approach to Domain-Specific Language Design Using UML

Author(s): Bran Selic

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [X] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [ ] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [X] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [ ] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [X] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [ ] Marginal significance.
 [X] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [X] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [ ] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [X] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

Bran Selic presents a method to use UML in order to define domain-specific
languages.  The paper first motivates why domain-specific languages are
important.  It then presents and describes some aspects of UML that lend
themselves particularly well to domain-specific language definition, most
importantly profiles, stereotypes, and model libraries.  Selic then assembles
these aspects and shows how they can be used together to describe a
domain-specific language.

The introduction of the paper makes some very big leaps of logic without any
reference, for example, "the open source movement is effective because it is
limited to a small number of general-purpose langugaes."  In his description of
the UML language elements, there is nothing presented that could not be found
in the technical specification of UML.  The entire paper, which is advertised
as defining a specific approach to solve a problem, lacks any sort of concrete
examples.  At best, there are slightly less general cases presented, but
nothing concrete.  The example of the multi-process computer came close to
being an example, but everything was described textually and in very little
detail.  The only thing in this paper that resembles a contribution is the
guidelines formapping domain concepts to UML metamodel elements.

8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1 - Highlights some important elements of UML.

S2 - Writing style is generally fairly easy to read, if a little verbose.

S3 - Provides a good set of guidelines to map domain concepts to UML metamodel
elements.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1 - There are a few large leaps in logic without citation.

W2 - There were no concrete examples throughout the paper.

W3 - Some general examples were given using only words with no actual UML to be
seen.