Preface: Volume 72, Issue 3

This volume contains the Proceedings of the Workshop on Graph Transformation and Visual Modelling Techniques (GT-VMT 2002). The Workshop was held in Barcelona, Spain, on October 11 and 12, 2002, as satellite event of the First International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2002).

Background

Diagrammatic notations have accompanied the development of technical and scientific disciplines in fields as diverse as mechanical engineering, quantum physics, category theory, and software engineering. In general, diagrammatic notations allow the construction of images associated with an interpretation based on considering as significant some well-defined spatial relations among graphical tokens. These tokens either derive from conventional notations employed in a user community or are elements specially designed to convey some meaning. The notations serve the purpose of defining the (types of) entities one is interested in and the types of relations among these entities. Hence, types must be distinguishable from one another and no ambiguity may arise as to their interpretation. Moreover, the set of spatial relations to be considered must be clearly defined, and the holding of any relation among any set of elements must be decidable.The evolution of diagrammatic notations usually follows a pattern that, from their usage as illustrations of sentences written in some formal or natural language, leads to the definition of "modelling languages". These languages are endowed with rules for the construction of "visual sentences" from some elementary graphical components, and for interpreting the meaning of these sentences with respect to the modeled domain, up to rules for mapping the behaviour of the modeled systems onto the behaviour of the visual elements in the model.

Workshop Objectives

As diagrammatic notations, such as UML, become widespread in software engineering and visual end user environments, there is an increasing need of formal methods to precisely define the syntax and semantics of such diagrams. In particular, when visual models of systems or processes constitute executable specifications of systems, not only is a non-ambiguous specifications of their static syntax and semantics needed, but also an adequate notion of diagram dynamics. Such a notion must establish links (e.g., morphisms) which relate diagram transformations and transformations of the objects of the underlying domain. The field of Graph Grammars and Graph Transformation Systems has contributed much insight into the solution of these problems, but also other approaches (e.g., meta modelling, constraint-based and other rule-based systems), have been developed to tackle specific issues.The workshop has followed in the line of successful workshops on Graph Transformations and Visual Modelling Techniques, which were before held as satellite events of ICALP'00 and ICALP'01. It has gathered researchers working with different methodologies to discuss the relative merits and weaknesses of the different approaches to problems such as diagram parsing, diagram transformation, integrated management of syntactic and semantic aspects, tool support for working with visual models. The focus has been on methodological aspects rather than on particular technical aspects.

Program Committee

The papers in this volume were reviewed by the program committee consisting of

Paolo Bottoni (Co-Chair)	Department of Computer Science, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy
Andrea Corradini	Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Italy
Gregor Engels	Mathematics/Computer Science Department, University of Paderborn, Germany
Reiko Heckel	Mathematics/Computer Science Department, University of Paderborn, Germany
Stuart Kent	Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, UK
Bernd Meyer	School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Mark Minas (Co-Chair)	Department of Computer Science, University of the Federal Armed Forces, Munich, Germany
Francesco Parisi Presicce	Department of Computer Science, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy
Mauro Pezzè	Department of Information Sciences, University of Milan Bicocca, Italy
Grzegorz Rozenberg	Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Gabriele Taentzer	Computer Science Department, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Full-size table

Workshop program

The workshop was scheduled for one and a half day and included a session with an invited talk by Martin Gogolla as well as 12presentations of papers in four regular sessions on Geometry and Visualization, on Frameworks and Tools, on Euler/Venn Diagrams, and on Components, Models, and Semantics.

Joint Session

The workshop featured a special session on Case Studies for Visual Modelling Techniques held jointly with the Workshop onSoftware Evolution Through Transformations (SET 2002).This session was part of the work carried out under the European research training network SegraVis (for Syntactic and Semantic Integration of Visual Modelling Techniques) with the objective to employ, evaluate, and improve visual modelling techniques in specific domains, including (but not limited to)

modelling support for software evolution and refactoring

modelling of component-based software architectures

specification of applications with mobile soft- and hardware

Beside a general discussion of these objectives, the session consisted in presentations of three submitted case studies and position statements by the SegraVis objective coordinators.

Acknowledgement

This workshop was supported by the European research training network Segra Vis.