Creating Semantic Representations of Diagrams
AGTIVE '99 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Applications of Graph Transformations with Industrial Relevance
Visual language semantics specification in the VisPro system
VIP '02 Selected papers from the 2002 Pan-Sydney workshop on Visualisation - Volume 22
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The effective use of visual languages requires a precise understanding of their meaning. Moreover, it is impossible to prove properties of visual languages like soundness of transformation rules or correctness results without having a formal language definition. Although this sounds obvious, it is surprising that only little work has been done about the semantics of visual languages, and even worse, there is no general framework available for the semantics specification of different visual languages. We present such a framework that is based on a rather general notion of abstract visual syntax. This framework allows a logical as well as a denotational approach to visual semantics, and it facilitates the formal reasoning about visual languages and their properties. We illustrate the concepts of the proposed approach by defining abstract syntax and semantics for the visual languages VEX, Show and Tell, and Euler Circles. For the latter we also prove a rule for visual reasoning.