1,198 research outputs found
Design, construction, and application of a generic visual language generation environment
2000-2001 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe
Application-oriented spatial graph grammars
The Reserved Graph Grammar (RGG) is a general graph grammar formalism that expresses a wide range of visual languages. This paper presents an extension to RGG with the capability of spatial specification. Graph transformation satisfying the spatial specification can be performed in the process of parsing. The RGG with spatial specification can be applied to various types of applications. The paper demonstrates an example for mathematical expression recognition
A Graphical User Interface for Designing Graph Grammars
Graph grammar has been widely applied in many scientific areas. However, designing graph grammar is very challenging for users without strong computer science background. This paper presents a graphical user interface (GUI) for designing graph grammars following an edge-based context-sensitive graph grammar formalism, EGG. This GUI significantly eases graph grammar design, especially for users unfamiliar with the grammar format
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Formalizing graphical notations
The thesis describes research into graphical notations for software engineering, with a principal interest in ways of formalizing them. The research seeks to provide a theoretical basis that will help in designing both notations and the software tools that process them.
The work starts from a survey of literature on notation, followed by a review of techniques for formal description and for computational handling of notations. The survey concentrates on collecting views of the benefits and the problems attending notation use in software development; the review covers picture description languages, grammars and tools such as generic editors and visual programming environments. The main problem of notation is found to be a lack of any coherent, rigorous description methods. The current approaches to this problem are analysed as lacking in consensus on syntax specification and also lacking a clear focus on a defined concept of notated expression.
To address these deficiencies, the thesis embarks upon an exploration of serniotic, linguistic and logical theory; this culminates in a proposed formalization of serniosis in notations, using categorial model theory as a mathematical foundation. An argument about the structure of sign systems leads to an analysis of notation into a layered system of tractable theories, spanning the gap between expressive pictorial medium and subject domain. This notion of 'tectonic' theory aims to treat both diagrams and formulae together.
The research gives details of how syntactic structure can be sketched in a mathematical sense, with examples applying to software development diagrams, offering a new solution to the problem of notation specification. Based on these methods, the thesis discusses directions for resolving the harder problems of supporting notation design, processing and computer-aided generic editing. A number of future research areas are thereby opened up. For practical trial of the ideas, the work proceeds to the development and partial implementation of a system to aid the design of notations and editors. Finally the thesis is evaluated as a contribution to theory in an area which has not attracted a standard approach
Parsing of Adaptive Star Grammars
In a recent paper, adaptive star grammars have been proposed as an
extension of node and hyperedge replacement grammars. A
rule in an adaptive star grammar is actually a rule schema which, via the
so-called cloning operation, yields a potentially infinite number of
concrete rules. Adaptive star grammars are motivated by application areas
such as modeling and refactoring object-oriented programs, and they are more
powerful than node and hyperedge replacement grammars by this mechanism. It
has been shown that the membership problem is decidable for a reasonably
large subclass of adaptive star grammars, however no parser has been
proposed. This paper describes such a parser for this subclass motivated by
the well-known string parser by Cocke, Younger, and
Kasami
Event-driven grammars: Relating abstract and concrete levels of visual languages
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-007-0051-2In this work we introduce event-driven grammars, a kind of graph grammars that are especially suited for visual modelling environments generated by meta-modelling. Rules in these grammars may be triggered by user actions (such as creating, editing or connecting elements) and in their turn may trigger other user-interface events. Their combination with triple graph transformation systems allows constructing and checking the consistency of the abstract syntax graph while the user is building the concrete syntax model, as well as managing the layout of the concrete syntax representation. As an example of these concepts, we show the definition of a modelling environment for UML sequence diagrams. A discussion is also presented of methodological aspects for the generation of environments for visual languages with multiple views, its connection with triple graph grammars, the formalization of the latter in the double pushout approach and its extension with an inheritance concept.This work has been partially sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science with projects MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-06) and MODUWEB (TIN 2006-09678)
Reusing Semantics in Visual Editors: A Case for Reference Attribute Grammars
The semantic formalism reference attribute grammars (RAGs) allows graphs to be superimposed on abstract syntax trees. This paper investigates how RAGs can be used to model visual languages, with a case study of a control language that also has a textual syntax. The language contains blocks on which a total execution order is defined based on connections and layout information. One strength of RAGs is reusability, and we demonstrate this by reusing the definition of the execution order in the visual editor to provide semantic feedback to the user
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