TOWARDS REQUIREMENTS FOR A META MODELING FORMALISM TO SUPPORT VISUAL LAW REPRESENTATIONS
Hans-Georg Fill · 2012
In order to enable machine based analyses of visual law representations we propose to use concepts from the area of meta modeling. Thereby the syntactic structures of visual representations can be represented formally. As a starting point we illustrate how meta modeling concepts can be applied to a visual law representation and then derive requirements for an according meta modeling formalism. 1. Motivation In the area of visual law many different kinds of electronically available visual representations have been created in the past 1 . In order to realize machine-based analyses and thus aid users in dealing with the contents of large amounts of such representations, the provision of an appropriate founda- tion in the form of a machine-readable language is necessary. Depending on the way the visual rep- resentation has been created, it may however either just consist of a raster image or may come in a format that contains more information about the composition of the elements in the image - e.g. in the case of vector graphics that specify graphical primitives and their visual properties. In some cases, the representations may have even been described in formats that abstract from the purely graphical representations and thus allow for more comprehensive analyses of the contents. Exam- ples for such abstractions would be graph-based formats that specify nodes, edges, and their attrib- utes and visual representations as e.g. in GraphML 2 . However, as only a small fraction of represen- tations in visual law are graph-based, it is necessary to turn to formats that are capable of abstract- ing from the purely graphical descriptions and that are at the same time flexible enough to be ap- plied to a variety of visual law representations. This can be accomplished by reverting to formats in the area of visual modeling languages. The syntax of such modeling languages is thereby typically described by meta models and the semantics by natural language statements or through the specifi- cation of according algorithms. In the following we will therefore derive requirements for a meta modeling formalism that is able to support representations in the area of visual law. In section 2 we will briefly outline the necessary foundations from the area of meta modeling. The intended application is subsequently illustrated by an example in section 4 that is used to derive the requirements for the meta modeling formalism.