UbiLang: Towards a Domain Specific Modeling Language for Specification of Ubiquitous Games Ricardo Guerreiro, André Rosa, Vasco Sousa, Vasco Amaral, Nuno Correia Computer Science Department, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Quinta da Torre, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal {rmg15404, adr13041}@fct.unl.pt, vasco.sousa@gmail.com {vasco.amaral, nmc}@di.fct.unl.pt Abstract. As new ubiquitous projects emerge, it is often required the integration of ubiquitous devices in development frameworks. This commonly leads to developing new frameworks, usually created in General Purpose Languages (GPL). Although this solves immediate problems, it also leads to a decrease of productivity and efficiency, due time spent while adapting code. This results, in most cases, on a development process starting from scratch when most of the times the concepts were already used in previous projects. This project proposes tackling this problem by implementing a Domain-Specific Modeling Language called UbiLang. By carefully taking into account concepts of the domain problem, UbiLang has the main goal of enabling ubiquitous games developers to speed-up their problem specification during the design phase. Allowing then early error detection by validating the system model on a higher abstraction level than code and by improving application development time contribute to faster application prototyping. Keywords: Domain Specific Modeling Language, Ubiquitous Game Devices, Ubiquitous Gaming, Meta-Modeling, Language Engineering. 1 Introduction The culture of gaming has a long tradition since ancient board games, such as the Mesopotamian’s “Royal Game of Ur”[1]. Currently, games are a real worldwide phenomenon recognized as an important research topics[2] and almost every day new devices are released into market with the purpose of improving gaming experience. Permitting the five human senses to participate in the experience, these improvements have the goal of providing new perspectives of time, space and interaction within the game itself. This technological development can be observed in the evolution of ubiquitous hardware like gloves, head-mounted displays and others, which are often tested in games[2]. As defined in [3], a Ubiquitous Device is – “an electronic device capable of using its internet, wireless and other networking capabilities that are so embedded in the environment that the devices can be used virtually used anywhere and anytime. This concept embraces a broad range of possibilities, which include communications (cell phones),ubiquitous computing (notebook computers), delivery of images (displays) and products for identifying or managing people and things (objects using wireless IC tags, like RFID tags)”. Another fact its that the time to market is of a crucial essence in the Ubicomp domain area, due its quick evolution pace. As new Ubiquitous Projects emerge, it is often required the creation of a new types of components (forming new Ubiquitous Devices). INForum 2010 - II Simp´ osio de Inform´atica, Lu´ ıs S. Barbosa, Miguel P. Correia (eds), 9-10 Setembro, 2010, pp. 449–460