Domain-specific visual languages for specifying and generating data mapping systems

Many application domains, including enterprise systems integration, health informatics and construction IT, require complex data to be transformed from one format to another. We have developed several tools to support specification and generation of such data mappings using domain-specific visual languages. We describe motivation for this work, challenges in developing visual mapping metaphors for different target users and problem domains, and illustrate using examples from several of our developed systems. We compare cognitive dimension-based evaluations of the different approaches and summarise the lessons we have learned. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.