An institution theory of formal meta-modelling in graphically extended BNF

Meta-modelling plays an important role in model driven software development.In this paper,a graphic extension of BNF (GEBNF) is proposed to define the abstract syntax of graphic modelling languages.Fro...     

QUICK: a tool for graphical user-interface construction by non-programmers

The last decade has placed the superiority of graphical user interfaces over traditional text-based approaches beyond dispute. In almost all contexts, users have found graphical interfaces easier to learn, faster to use, and less error-prone. However, it has been shown that the creation of powerful graphical interfaces takes up to 80% of the time required to develop an application. In our work, we seek to extend the benefits of graphical interaction to the next layer of computer user—the interface designer. Our work in this area is distinguished from other efforts by two important differences. First, while other efforts focus primarily on the design of standard user interfaces, our approach emphasizes the creation of unique and innovative interfaces by supporting, among other things, arbitrary user-designed graphical representations, direct specification of animation, and digitized sound. Second, our goal is to cater to the nonprogrammer. Thus, we address a challenging trade-off: maximizing power and flexibility in an extremely simple environment. We explore the utility of the prototype object-oriented paradigm, a high-level userinterface language, and a direct-manipulation programming environment in this context.     

Rapid software integration using structured methods

In this paper we discuss an approach to organizing the integration of 110,000 lines of C, SQL, Assembler, and microcode distributed over a network of 36 processors of four types so that it could be accomplished in six months. The software runs on a test system architecture consisting of a LAN-based workstation group and a set of VME-based embedded processors. By using structured methodology, parallelism in the integration process was achieved. The necessary stub tools were identified and developed before integration began. The principles followed and experiences of integrating the system are discussed.     

Modeling time criticality of information

In this paper, we continue the research on formal treatment of attributes of information, based on the computational approach. In this scenario, the usefulness of advisory information is measured by the decrease in complexity of a problem we need to solve. We propose to model the time criticality via usefulness of a piece of information which is received during the computation. As a modeling tool, we use deterministic finite automata.     

Branching-time logics with path relativisation

We define extensions of the full branching-time temporal logic CTL^? in which the path quantifiers are relativised by formal languages of infinite words, and consider its natural fragments obtained by extending the logics CTL and CTL⁺ in the same way. This yields a small and two-dimensional hierarchy of temporal logics parametrised by the class of languages used for the path restriction on one hand, and the use of temporal operators on the other. We motivate the study of such logics through two application scenarios: in abstraction and refinement they offer more precise means for the exclusion of spurious traces; and they may be useful in software synthesis where decidable logics without the finite model property are required. We study the relative expressive power of these logics as well as the complexities of their satisfiability and model-checking problems.     

Sets of Globally Optimal Stream Surfaces for Flow Visualization

Stream surfaces are a well‐studied and widely used tool for the visualization of 3D flow fields. Usually, stream surface seeding is carried out manually in time‐consuming trial and error procedures. Only recently automatic selection methods were proposed. Local methods support the selection of a set of stream surfaces, but, contrary to global selection methods, they evaluate only the quality of the seeding lines but not the quality of the whole stream surfaces. Global methods, on the other hand, only support the selection of a single optimal stream surface until now. However, for certain flow fields a single stream surface is not sufficient to represent all flow features. In our work, we overcome this limitation by introducing a global selection technique for a set of stream surfaces. All selected surfaces optimize global stream surface quality measures and are guaranteed to be mutually distant, such that they can convey different flow features. Our approach is an efficient extension of the most recent global selection method for single stream surfaces. We illustrate its effectiveness on a number of analytical and simulated flow fields and analyze the quality of the results in a user study.     

A reactive extension of the OpenMusic visual programming language

Objectives: OpenMusic (OM) is a domain-specific visual programming language designed for computer-aided music composition. This language based on Common Lisp allows composers to develop functional processes generating or transforming musical data, and to execute them locally by demand-driven evaluations. As most historical computer-aided composition environments, OM relies on a transformational declarative paradigm, which is hard to conciliate with reactive data-flow (an evaluation scheme more adequate to the development of interactive systems). We propose to link these two evaluation paradigms in the same and consistent visual programming framework.Methods: We establish a denotational semantics of the visual language, which gives account for its demand-driven evaluation mechanism and the incremental construction of programs. We then extend this semantics to enable reactive computations in the functional graphs.Results: The resulting language merges data-driven executions with the existing demand-driven mechanism. A conservative implementation is proposed.Conclusions: We show that the incremental construction of programs and their data-driven and demand-driven evaluations can be smoothly integrated in the visual programming workflow. This integration allows for the propagation of changes in the programs, and the evaluation of graphically designed functional expressions as a response to external events, a first step in bridging the gap between computer-assisted composition environments and real-time musical systems.     

全局性模态词与基本模态语言的扩充

模态语言是讨论关系结构的一种简洁的语言。基本模态语言是仅有一个模态算子◇的模态语言,用ML（◇）表示此语言,但基本模态语言对框架关系的表达力并不是完全的,加入新的模态算子是增强模态语言表达力的方法之一。在基本模态语言ML（◇）基础上增加全局性模态词“E”得到ML（◇,E）语言,这种更丰富的语言对关系模型和关系框架的表达力明显强于基本模态语言。     

Computing Minimum Area Homologies

Calculating and categorizing the similarity of curves is a fundamental problem which has generated much recent interest. However, to date there are no implementations of these algorithms for curves on surfaces with provable guarantees on the quality of the measure. In this paper, we present a similarity measure for any two cycles that are homologous, where we calculate the minimum area of any homology (or connected bounding chain) between the two cycles. The minimum area homology exists for broader classes of cycles than previous measures which are based on homotopy. It is also much easier to compute than previously defined measures, yielding an efficient implementation that is based on linear algebra tools. We demonstrate our algorithm on a range of inputs, showing examples which highlight the feasibility of this similarity measure.