Enforced generative patterns for the specification of the syntax and semantics of visual languages

Abstract

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Visual Languages and Computing. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Visual Languages and Computing,19, 4 (2008) DO: 10.1016/j.jvlc.2008.04.004Selected Papers from IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing 2007 (VL/HCC 2007)We present the new notion of enforced generative pattern, a structure that declares positive or negative conditions that must be satisfied by a model. Patterns are applied to transformation rules resulting in new rules that modify models according to the pattern specification. In the case of a negative pattern, an application condition is added to the rule. In the case of a positive one, the rule is modified to consider additional context in its left-hand side and to increase its effects. We have defined these patterns in an abstract setting, which enables their instantiation for different structures, like graphs, triple graphs and graph transformation rules. We apply the previous concepts to the specification of the syntax and semantics of visual languages. In particular, we show instantiations for: (i) graphs, with applications at the syntactical level; (ii) triple graphs, for the coordination of syntax and static semantics; and (iii) rules, for the incremental construction of execution rules. We present some examples that illustrate the usefulness of the combination of these three instantiations. In particular, we show the specification of environments for visual languages with token-holder semantics, discrete-event semantics and communication semantics.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, projects MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-06) and MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678). We thank the referees for their detailed and useful com- ments, which helped us in improving the paper