How to leverage Domain-Driven Design to foster Digital Scholarly Editing and DSL

The field of digital scholarly editing is deemed to be particularly challenging from a software engineering point of view. Indeed, after decades of research activities, computational philology still lacks effective tools and efficient procedures organized in common interfaces, decoupled application services and domain-specific commodities. As a matter of fact, there is neither convergence on how to model software applications to meet philological requirements nor traditional philologists fully satisfied with the current digital solutions. By adopting the Domain Driven Design approach, we start our modeling activities by defining the problem space of our domain which, in turn, is broken into small components (called sub-domains) to progressively refine the ongoing digital models. In this way, together with the experts, we are able to identify the main capabilities of the field we want to model and strive to design coherent domain-specific solutions for such capabilities (bounded contexts).