APPLICATION OF GRAPH TRANSFORMATION TO VISUAL LANGUAGES
Roswitha Bardohl, Gabi Taentzer, Mark Minas, Andy Schürr · WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 1999
Syntax of Visual Languages Sentences of visual languages may often be regarded as assemblies of pictorial objects with spatial relationships like `above' or `contains' between them, i.e., their representations are a kind of directed graphs. Such a spatial relationships graph (SRG), which describes the structure of a visual sentence seen as a picture, is often complemented by a more abstract graph, the so-called abstract syntax graph (ASG). An ASG provides the information about the syntax and semantics of a visual sentence in a more succinct form. It is geared towards the interpretation or compilation of the regarded sentence. 1.3. DEFINING THE SYNTAX OF VISUAL LANGUAGES 13 The distinction between ASGs and SRGs---as introduced in [55]---has been inspired by the Model-View-Controller concept of Smalltalk and the traditional distinction between abstract and concrete syntax for textual languages. It is a prerequisite for modeling those visual languages, which offer different representat...