Positioning-Based Domain-Specific Modelling through Mobile Devices

Modelling is a central activity in many disciplines. It is typically performed with the support of modelling tools that run on desktop computers or laptops, i.e., in static settings. How-ever, some modelling scenarios require a faithful representation of the position of the model elements in the physical world. Such scenarios would benefit from the ability to model in mobility and exploit the data obtained from the sensors embedded in mobile devices. For this purpose, we propose a conceptual approach to positioning-based modelling based on the combination of a physical dimension (as provided by the sensors of mobile devices) and an ontological one (as provided by domain meta-models). We showcase different scenarios for these ideas, and present a prototype app - called METAPHORE - that runs on iOS devices and realizes these concepts.

I. Introduction

Modelling is an essential task in any engineering discipline. Models are abstractions of the system under study, built for a given purpose, and often used to design, understand, analyse, verify, test or simulate (existing or new) systems, among other activities [1].