4th International Workshop on Language Engineering (ATEM 2007)

Following the great success of previous editions, ATEM2007 is the 4 th edition of the ATEM workshop series. The first two editions were held with WCRE in 2003 and 2004, while the 3 rd one was held with MoDELS 2006. ATEM has always been fo-cused on engineering of language descriptions. In order to cover as many aspects of language descriptions important for greater success and adoption of model-driven engineering, ATEM has been evolving so as its scope: • The first edition was about metamodels and schemas. • The second about was metamodels, schemas and grammars. • The third edition was about metamodels, schemas, grammars and ontologies. Throughout the interaction with the MDE community and based on the papers submitted to and topics discussed about in the previous ATEM editions, we have decided that ATEM2007 is about language engineering. Thus, the intention of ATEM2007 is to further encourage and expand inter-disciplinary work (e.g., natural language engineering) on language descriptions that should bring many promising opportunities for the area of model-driven engineering. If Software Engineering is " the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifi-able approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software " [1], then Software Language Engineering (SLE) can be viewed as the application of a systematic , disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, use, and maintenance of languages in software engineering [2]. SLE is particularly concerned with (i) the life cycle of software languages (iii) programming support and engineering principles for transformations (or map-pings, translations, conversions) between different software languages or dif