By reducing the time and cost of the solutions of real life problems, information technologies had a deep impact on the every little aspect of both our professional and daily lives. Especially with the urge of the internet era, this impact is drastically increasing as the solutions now became time-free and location-free (Park and Lim, 1999; Calvary et al., 2003; Rau et al., 2004; Lam and Swayne, 2001; Kim 2001).

One of the largest challenges of the IT field is the gap between the real world systems and their representations in the computer, or to be more specific today's online world. Numerous professionals proposed notations, languages and methods to provide solutions to narrow this gap (Kernighan and Ritchie, 1978; Wirth, 1971; Gosling et al., 2005; Tom, 2001; Booch et al., 2000; Heng and Mackie, 2009; Laporti et al., 2009; Horsburgh et al., 2009; Reinhartz-Berger and Sturm, 2009; Schwabe and Rossi, 1998). Most of those solutions are being used by many of the IT and related professionals today.

However, with the increasing shift of systems to the online world there still resides a need to have a representation tool to model and convert real life systems to the world of computers.

Considering the online world of today and the predicted integrated and semantic, structure of tomorrow, one can easily say that this new tool

• should allow faster modeling,
• should be easy to use,
• should be able to represent every element of the real life systems,
• should be able to represent the relations between the elements of the real life systems,
• should easily be used for modeling different systems,
• should be able to produce a representation which can be interpreted not only by humans but also by machines,
• should be able to produce a representation which can easily be converted to the existing or the future technologies.

Considering the above reasons and more, we propose the Modo language.

About the document

This document contains the specification of the Modo language. In this first chapter, Introduction, the acknowledgement and the general information about the document is mentioned.

The rest of the document contains the following chapters:

Motivation chapter covers the underlying reasons, which led us to develop Modo.

Definitions chapter covers the technical terminology and jargon that we find compulsory to make the most use of this document.

Structure and Syntax chapter gives detailed information about the syntax of the language using Extended Backus-Naur Form, Extended BNF (ISO/IEC 14977, 1996). Along with the syntax, lexical sequence, constraints and rules are also described.

Elements chapter covers the element declarations and the uses of the elements in Modo definitions.

Selectors chapter introduces selectors conceptually. Additionally selector syntax and the uses of the selectors are described in this chapter.

Expressions chapter gives information about the expressions for operators, constants, strings and elements.

Scope

This document specifies/contains structure and syntax of the Modo language.

This document does not specify/contain

• use cases
• system dependent elements/methods
• technology dependent elements/methods
• conversions and interpretations of Modo to other technologies

Conformance

This document is intended for developers, designers, system designers and modelers and other related professionals whose activities contain modeling of real life systems for computer technologies.

For better understanding of this document, the audience must have experience in the following:

• Object oriented system modeling
• Computer programming languages
• EBNF notation (ISO/IEC 14977, 1996)

Credits and Acknowledgement

The authors thank Sanpark IT & Design Co. Ltd., for maintaining the professional environment and encouragement that resulted and catalyzed the development of Modo. They also thank Recep Kütük from Sanpark for the Modo identity and the document formatting.

Modo language is shaped by the ideas, practice and experience of Aykut Aydınlı and the Sanpark crew; starting from 2005. The latest version of Modo is shaped by Aykut Aydınlı and Doruk Eker.

This document is authored and edited by Aykut Aydınlı and Doruk Eker.