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Event-driven grammars: relating abstract and concrete levels of visual languages

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Abstract

In 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento Ing. Informàtica, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain

    Esther Guerra

  2. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Ing. Informática, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid, Spain

    Juan de Lara

Authors
  1. Esther Guerra
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  2. Juan de Lara
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Juan de Lara.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Francesco Parisi-Presicce.

This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the ICGT’04 conference, see [21].

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Guerra, E., de Lara, J. Event-driven grammars: relating abstract and concrete levels of visual languages. Softw Syst Model 6, 317–347 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-007-0051-2

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