In recent years, graph applications have attracted much attention in computer science and several other research fields. The book Graph and model transformation is written from a mathematical point of view, so there are no codes or code examples. Instead, the book is a comprehensive mathematical introduction to graph transformation and model transformations. The book consists of four parts and two appendices, but logically is divided into three sections: “Introduction” (chapters 1 to 3), “Transformation Systems” (chapters 4 to 9), and “Applications” (chapters 10 to 12).
The introduction provides general definitions and a historical overview, along with a detailed overview of the topics of the book. Chapter 2 covers graph transformation and chapter 3 provides information about model transformations. It is important to mention that chapter 2 not only holds annotations of typed attribute graphs and transformations, but also introduces the local Church-Rosser theorem, the parallelism theorem, amalgamation, the concurrency theorem, and the confluence theorem. Using annotations from chapter 2, chapter 3 not only gives a comprehensive introduction to model transformation, but also defines triple graph grammars (TGG) as a powerful technique for bidirectional model transformation.
The “Transformation Systems” section consists of two parts. In the first one, the authors discuss M-adhesive transformation systems and multi-amalgamated transformations. In the second part, the focus is on model transformations based on TGG. There, the authors describe in detail the formal TGG framework for model transformation and model integration. It is shown that all results in M-adhesive transformations hold for the specific case of TGG. The most interesting section in this part of the book is on the concept of forward translation rules, in particular the authors’ derivation of forward translation rules. The latter are alternative to forward rules, but they allow a simplification of control mechanisms for executing model transformation.
The “Applications” part of the book provides a discussion of modeling and analysis of adaptive systems by using algebraic graph grammars (AGG), followed by enterprise modeling and tools related to AGG and TGG such as ActiGra, HMF Henshin, the visual TGG editor, GROOVE, GReAT, VMTS, and a few others. These tools are described and compared to general model transformation tools like ATL and MOMENT2-MT.
The book concludes with two valuable appendices. Appendix A holds basic notations of category theory, while Appendix B holds proofs for topics discussed in M-adhesive transformation systems and those in TGG-based transformation systems. Another plus for this book is the large and comprehensive reference section.
In the end, I must say that the text is written in a clear and well-structured manner; as such, it can be a valuable addition to the bookshelf of any researcher from mathematics or theoretical computer science or those practitioners who develop parallel code for visual modeling.
