ALCHEMIST

A General Purpose Transformation Generator

What is/was ALCHEMIST/VITAL?

VITAL was a four-and-a-half-year ESPRIT II research and development project that involved nine organizations in five countries. The project produced a methodology and workbench to support development of knowledge-based systems over their whole life cycle. It involved about 120 man-years of effort and had a budget of about 12.6 million ECUs (around $15.6 million).

ALCHEMIST is a general purpose transformation generator developed in the VITAL project. The following excerpt is taken from an article published in the HICSS conference (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences) in 1994:

"ALCHEMIST is a general purpose object-oriented transformation generator. ALCHEMIST provides a new approach to developing transformations between any well-defined representations. It allows users to define the syntactic structure of the data representations and the related structure associations with a grammar notation. These grammars can then be augmented with semantic operations. From this description a persistent object-oriented representation is formed and a transformation module is generated automatically. This transformation module relies on an object representation of the parse tree. In this paper the principles underlying ALCHEMIST are discussed and its object-oriented design decisions are described."

The following researchers took part in the project from the Department of Computer Science at the Univeristy of Helsinki:

Heikki Mannila, professor
Henry Tirri, project leader
Greger Lindén, researcher
Inkeri Verkamo, researcher

and part-time workers:

Tomi Silander
Jukka-Pekka Vainio

Publications

See the VITAL page.

Computer Programmes

ALCHEMIST - A General Purpose Transformation Generator. Runs under Solaris 2.x.
OCML2FND - An interface (= set of data transformation modules) between the VITAL Workbench and a commercial CASE tool. Runs under Solaris 2.x.

DocMan Group. Last updated Dec 7, 1995.