There has been substantial growth in the use of JSON-based grammars, as well as other standard data serialization languages, to create visualizations. Each of these grammars serves a purpose: some focus on particular computational tasks (such as animation), some are concerned with certain chart types (such as maps), and some target specific data domains (such as ML). Despite the prominence of this interface form, there has been little detailed analysis of the characteristics of these languages. In this study, we survey and analyze the design and implementation of 57 JSON-style DSLs for visualization. We analyze these languages supported by a collected corpus of examples for each DSL (consisting of 4395 instances) across a variety of axes organized into concerns related to domain, conceptual model, language relationships, affordances, and general practicalities. We identify tensions throughout these areas, such as between formal and colloquial specifications, among types of users, and within the composition of languages. Through this work, we seek to support language implementers by elucidating the choices, opportunities, and tradeoffs in visualization DSL design.

No Grammar to Rule Them All: A Survey of JSON-style DSLs for Visualization

Domain-specific modelling languages (DSMLs) help practitioners solve modelling challenges specific to various domains. As domains grow more complex and heterogeneous in nature, industrial practitioners often face challenges in the usability of graphical DSMLs. There is still a lack of guidelines that industrial language engineers should consider for improving the user experience (UX) of these practitioners. The overall topic of UX is vast and subjective, and general guidelines and definitions of UX are often overly generic or tied to specific technological spaces. To solve this challenge, we leverage existing design principles and standards of human-centred design and UX in general and propose definitions and guidelines for UX and user experience design (UXD) aspects in graphical DSMLs. In this paper, we categorize the key UXD aspects, primarily based on our experience in developing industrial DSMLs, that language engineers should consider during graphical DSML development. Ultimately, these UXD guidelines help to improve the general usability of industrial DSMLs and support language engineers in developing better DSMLs that are independent of graphical modelling tools and more widely accepted by their users.

/pdf/design-guidelines-for-improving-user-experience-in-1254f5s2.pdf

Design guidelines for improving user experience in industrial domain-specific modelling languages

Danish insurance and pension companies are required by financial regulations to report certain financial quantities to prove that they are solvent and managed responsibly. Parts of these quantities are computed the same way for all companies, whereas so-called management actions, describing, e.g., surplus sharing, vary between companies. Hence it is desirable to have a flexible calculation platform that allows actuaries to easily create company-specific models, which are also computationally efficient. In this paper, we present our work with implementing a code generator for a DSL called the Management Action Language (MAL) as a form of variability management. While one of the goals of MAL is to generate efficient code from an actuary's specification, it is non-trivial how to produce such code. We identify four reoccurring patterns in the models created by actuaries as subjects to optimisations. We describe our process for implementing a code-generator by a) identifying four specification patterns (inheritance, union types, type filtering, and numerical maps) that are pervasive in these calculations, and b) describing how to generate efficient C# from MAL for these patterns. We evaluate the code-generator by benchmarking it against handwritten production code and show an approximate 1.3× speedup in a production environment. This evaluation demonstrates that, with MAL, an individual pension company may reuse the general calculation platform and all of the optimisations built into MAL's code generator when modelling the company's business rules.

Transforming domain models to efficient C# for the Danish pension industry

Domain-specific languages seek to provide domain guarantees that eliminate many errors allowed by general-purpose languages. Still, a domain-specific language requires additional quality assurance measures to ensure that specifications behave as intended by the users. However, some domains may have specific quality assurance measures (e.g., proofs, experiments, or case studies) with little tradition of using quality assurance measures customary to software engineering. We investigate the possibility of accommodating such domains by conducting a workshop with 11 prospective users of a domain-specific language named MAL for the pension industry. The workshop emphasised the need for supporting actuaries with new analytical tools for quality assurance and resulted in three designs: quantity monitors let users identify outlier behaviour, fragment debugging lets users debug with limited evaluative power, and debugging spreadsheets let users visualise, analyse, and remodel concrete calculations with an established domain tool. Based on our experiences, we hypothesise that co-design workshops are a viable approach for DSLs in a similar situation.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3486603.3486776

Co-designing DSL quality assurance measures for and with non-programming experts

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) have emerged as a plausible way for non-programming experts to efficiently express their domain knowledge. Recent DSL research has taken a technical perspective on how and why to create DSLs, resulting in a wealth of innovative tools, frameworks and technical approaches. Less attention has been paid to the design process. Namely, how can it ensure that the created DSL realises the expected benefits? This paper seeks to answer this question when designing DSLs for highly specialised domains subject to resource constraints, an evolving application domain, and scarce user participation. We propose an iteration of alternating activities in a human-centred design method that seeks to minimise the need for expensive implementation and user involvement. The method moves from a low-validity exploration of highly diverse language designs towards a higher-validity exploration of more homogeneous designs. We give an in-depth case study of designing an actuarial DSL called MAL, or Management Action Language, which allows actuaries to model so-called future management actions in asset/liability projections in life insurance and pension companies. The proposed human-centred design method was synthesised from this case study, where we found it useful for iteratively identifying and removing usability problems during the design.

Henning Niss

Papers

On Designing Applied DSLs for Non-Programming Experts in Evolving Domains