The use of semantic constraints on diagram editors

Serrano, José Artur Ferreira da Silva e Vale

doi:10.1109/vl.1995.520811

Cited by 15 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In particular, Serrano [1995] analyzes by hand the whole set of constraints defining a visual language to identify allowed violations of constraints, but does not provide an algorithm. Chok and Marriott [1995] provide an algorithm to create a control system from a Constraint Multiset Grammar (CMG), so that each sentence satisfies the whole set of constraints.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems

Bottoni

Costabile

Mussio

1999

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

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Computers are increasingly being seen not only as computing tools but more so as communication tools, thus placing special emphasis on human-computer interaction (HCI). In this article, the focus is on visual HCI, where the messages exchanged between human and computer are images appearing on the computer screen, as usual in current popular user interfaces. We formalize interactive sessions of a human-computer dialogue as a structured set of legal visual sentences, i.e., as a visual language, and show how rewriting systems can be generalized to specify both the pictorial and the computational aspects of visual languages. To this end, Visual Conditional Attributed Rewriting (VCARW) systems are introduced, and used for specification of visual languages. These specifications are given as inputs to a procedure illustrated in the article as a system of algorithms, which automatically generates control mechanisms of the interaction, thus favoring the design of more reliable and usable systems.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems

Bottoni

Costabile

Mussio

1999

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

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“…The informal definition of Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams is directly taken from [19] in order to demonstrate the expressiveness of our specification language and the reasoning capabilities of our DL system. Figure 2 shows an example ER diagram specifying a relationship between a pilot and an aircraft.…”

Section: Entity-relationship Diagramsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fully Formalized Theory for Describing Visual Notations

Haarslev

1998

Visual Language Theory

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This paper addresses issues in visual language theory with the help of logic formalisms that were developed for reasoning tasks by the artificial intelligence and spatial databases community, especially for spatial and diagrammatical reasoning. We describe an approach based on three formal components. Topology is used to define basic geometric objects. Theory about spatial relations from the domain of spatial databases is employed to define possible relationships between visual language elements. Description logic theory from the AI community is used to combine topology and spatial relations. The resulting theory has been successfully applied to formally specifying semantics of visual languages. The theory's application is illustrated with a specification of entity-relationship diagrams.

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“…On the other hand, methods based on parsers exploit compiler generator techniques to construct freehand editors automatically. In the literature, there are several arguments in favor of one or the other approach [Minas 1997;Rekers and Schürr 1997;Serrano 1995]. In particular, it is recognized that although the syntax-directed approach prevents the user from drawing syntactically or semantically incorrect diagrams, it constrains the editing process too much, and potentially reduces the user's ability to abstractly reason about the drawings s/he wants to compose.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A framework for modeling and implementing visual notations with applications to software engineering

Costagliola

Deufemia

Polese

2004

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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We present a framework for modeling visual notations and for generating the corresponding visual programming environments. The framework can be used for modeling the diagrammatic notations of software development methodologies, and to generate visual programming environments with CASE tools functionalities. This is accomplished through an underlying modeling process based on the visual notation syntactic model of eXtended Positional Grammars (XPG, for short), and the associated parsing methodology, XpLR. In particular, the process requires the modeling of the basic elements (visual symbols) of a visual notation, their syntactic properties, the relations between them, the syntactic rules to formally define the set of feasible visual sentences, and a set of semantic routines performing additional checks and translation tasks. Such a process is completely supported by the VLDesk system, which enables the automatic generation of an editor for drawing visual sentences, as well as a processor for their recognition, parsing, and translation into other notations.The proposed framework also provides the basis for the definition of a meta-CASE technology. In fact, we can customize the generated visual programming environment in terms of the supported visual notation, its syntactic properties, and the translation rules. We have used this framework to model several diagrammatic notations used in software development methodologies, including those of the Unified Modeling Language.

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The use of semantic constraints on diagram editors

Cited by 15 publications

References 12 publications

Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems

Specification and dialogue control of visual interaction through visual rewriting systems

A Fully Formalized Theory for Describing Visual Notations

A framework for modeling and implementing visual notations with applications to software engineering

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