Towards rule-based visual programming of generic visual systems

This paper illustrates how the diagram programming language DiaPlan can be used to program visual systems. DiaPlan is a visual rule-based language that is founded on the computational model of graph transformation. The language supports object-oriented programming since its graphs are hierarchically structured. Typing allows the shape of these graphs to be specified recursively in order to increase program security. Thanks to its genericity, DiaPlan allows to implement systems that represent and manipulate data in arbitrary diagram notations. The environment for the language exploits the diagram editor generator DiaGen for providing genericity, and for implementing its user interface and type checker.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures contribution to the First International Workshop on Rule-Based Programming (RULE'2000), September 19, 2000, Montreal, Canad

Creating Semantic Representations of Diagrams

. Diagrams that serve as a visual input facility for programming environments have to be translated into some kind of semantic description. This paper describes such a method which is based on a specification of the translation process. The translation process starts with a diagram, which is simply represented as a collection of atomic diagram components, and it ends up with some data structure as a semantic representation of the diagram. The specification of the translation process mainly consists of two parts: the specification of spatial relationships between atomic diagram components in terms of their numeric parameters (e.g., position, size), and an attributed hypergraph grammar that describes the concrete diagram syntax as well as the rules for generating the semantic representation. 1 Introduction In Proc. of the Int'l Workshop on Applications of Graph Transformation with Industrial Relevance (AGTIVE'99) at Monastery Rolduc, NL, September 1-3, 1999. Appears in LNCS,..