Strategic Port Graph Rewriting: an Interactive Modelling Framework

International audienceWe present strategic port graph rewriting as a basis for the implementation of visual modelling tools. The goal is to facilitate the specification and programming tasks associated with the modelling of complex systems. A system is represented by an initial graph and a collection of graph rewrite rules, together with a user-defined strategy to control the application of rules. The traditional operators found in strategy languages for term rewriting have been adapted to deal with the more general setting of graph rewriting, and some new constructs have been included in the strategy language to deal with graph traversal and management of rewriting positions in the graph. We give a formal semantics for the language, and describe its implementation: the graph transformation and visualisation tool Porgy

A graph rewriting programming language for graph drawing

This paper describes Grrr, a prototype visual graph drawing tool. Previously there were no visual languages for programming graph drawing algorithms despite the inherently visual nature of the process. The languages which gave a diagrammatic view of graphs were not computationally complete and so could not be used to implement complex graph drawing algorithms. Hence current graph drawing tools are all text based. Recent developments in graph rewriting systems have produced computationally complete languages which give a visual view of graphs both whilst programming and during execution. Grrr, based on the Spider system, is a general purpose graph rewriting programming language which has now been extended in order to demonstrate the feasibility of visual graph drawing

Graph Algorithm Animation with Grrr

We discuss geometric positioning, highlighting of visited nodes and user defined highlighting that form the algorithm animation facilities in the Grrr graph rewriting programming language. The main purpose of animation was initially for the debugging and profiling of Grrr code, but recently it has been extended for the purpose of teaching algorithms to undergraduate students. The animation is restricted to graph based algorithms such as graph drawing, list manipulation or more traditional graph theory. The visual nature of the Grrr system allows much animation to be gained for free, with no extra user effort beyond the coding of the algorithm, but we also discuss user defined animations, where custom algorithm visualisations can be explicitly defined for teaching and demonstration purposes

Strategic programming on graph rewriting systems

We describe a strategy language to control the application of graph rewriting rules, and show how this language can be used to write high-level declarative programs in several application areas. This language is part of a graph-based programming tool built within the port-graph transformation and visualisation environment PORGY.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533

Graph Creation, Visualisation and Transformation

We describe a tool to create, edit, visualise and compute with interaction nets - a form of graph rewriting systems. The editor, called GraphPaper, allows users to create and edit graphs and their transformation rules using an intuitive user interface. The editor uses the functionalities of the TULIP system, which gives us access to a wealth of visualisation algorithms. Interaction nets are not only a formalism for the specification of graphs, but also a rewrite-based computation model. We discuss graph rewriting strategies and a language to express them in order to perform strategic interaction net rewriting

Strategic Port Graph Rewriting: An Interactive Modelling and Analysis Framework

We present strategic portgraph rewriting as a basis for the implementation of visual modelling and analysis tools. The goal is to facilitate the specification, analysis and simulation of complex systems, using port graphs. A system is represented by an initial graph and a collection of graph rewriting rules, together with a user-defined strategy to control the application of rules. The strategy language includes constructs to deal with graph traversal and management of rewriting positions in the graph. We give a small-step operational semantics for the language, and describe its implementation in the graph transformation and visualisation tool PORGY.Comment: In Proceedings GRAPHITE 2014, arXiv:1407.767

A Graph Rewriting Visual Language for Database Programming

Textual database programming languages are computationally complete, but have the disadvantage of giving the user a non-intuitive view of the database information that is being manipulated. Visual languages developed in recent years have allowed naive users access to a direct representation of data, often in a graph form, but have concentrated on user interface rather than complex programming tasks. There is a need for a system which combines the advantages of both these programming methods. We describe an implementation of Spider, an experimental visual database programming language aimed at programmers. It uses a graph rewriting paradigm as a basis for a fully visual, computationally complete language. The graphs it rewrites represent the schema and instances of a database. The unique graph rewriting method used by Spider has syntactic and semantic simplicity. Its form of algorithmic expression allows complex computation to be easily represented in short programs. Furthermore, Spider has greater power than normally provided in textual systems, and we show that queries on the schema and associative queries can be performed easily and without requiring any additions to the language

Constraint specification by example in a Meta-CASE tool

CASE tools are very helpful to software engineers in different ways and in different phases of software development. However, they are not easy to specialise to meet the needs of particular application domains or particular software modelling requirements. Meta-CASE tools offer a way of providing such specialisation by enabling a designer to specify a tool which is then generated automatically. Constraints are often used in such meta-CASE tools as a technique for governing the syntax and semantics of model elements and the values of their attributes. However, although constraint definition is a difficult process it has attracted relatively little research attention. The PhD research described here presents an approach for improving the process of CASE tool constraint specification based on the notion of programming by example (or demonstration). The feasibility of the approach will be demonstrated via experiments with a prototype using the meta-CASE tool Diagram Editor Constraints System (DECS) as context

Modeling and Reasoning over Distributed Systems using Aspect-Oriented Graph Grammars

Aspect-orientation is a relatively new paradigm that introduces abstractions to modularize the implementation of system-wide policies. It is based on a composition operation, called aspect weaving, that implicitly modifies a base system by performing related changes within the system modules. Aspect-oriented graph grammars (AOGG) extend the classic graph grammar formalism by defining aspects as sets of rule-based modifications over a base graph grammar. Despite the advantages of aspect-oriented concepts regarding modularity, the implicit nature of the aspect weaving operation may also introduce issues when reasoning about the system behavior. Since in AOGGs aspect weaving is characterized by means of rule-based rewriting, we can overcome these problems by using known analysis techniques from the graph transformation literature to study aspect composition. In this paper, we present a case study of a distributed client-server system with global policies, modeled as an aspect-oriented graph grammar, and discuss how to use the AGG tool to identify potential conflicts in aspect weaving

An Algebra of Hierarchical Graphs

We define an algebraic theory of hierarchical graphs, whose axioms characterise graph isomorphism: two terms are equated exactly when they represent the same graph. Our algebra can be understood as a high-level language for describing graphs with a node-sharing, embedding structure, and it is then well suited for defining graphical representations of software models where nesting and linking are key aspects