Visual Specification and Automatic Transformation of Web Interchanging Documents

University Of Texas At Dallas, Richardson TX

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal presents a visual approach to the representation and validation of document structures specified in XML and transformation of one structure to another, in a general framework of automatic language generation. The underlying theory of this visual approach is a context-sensitive graph grammar formalism. The proposal demonstrates the conciseness and expressiveness of the graph grammar formalism and its suitability to visual specification and automatic generation of visual XML languages. The PI's previous research on the graph grammar formalism and visual language generation will be extended and adapted to suit automatic generation of visual XML design languages with tools that assist the design of XML-like of documents and their translations between each other. A set of tools will be developed to facilitate the visual specification of XML-like document structures and automatic generation of target documents. The tools would therefore enable a wide community to use the latest computing and Internet technology in storing and exchanging digital documents. The tools and the concepts associated with them will also make excellent teaching and self-training vehicles for the courses on programming languages, compilers, and visual interfaces.