Constraint Logic Programming and Diagram Completion

I got stimulating feedback after my last post on diagram completion. For instance, I was not aware of the SmartEMF project of Anders Hessellund et al. They aim at extending EMF with an inference engine to facilitate reasoning about models. Interestingly, they also get some guidance that way. A similar approach has been realized in the AToM3 tool by Sagar Sen et al. They also employ constraint logic programming to infer model completions.

The diagram completion presented in my last post has been incorporated into the DiaGen tool which is based on hyperedge replacement grammars. However, metamodels are more popular nowadays for language specification. I already introduced the DiaMeta tool on this blog. It is based on DiaGen, but allows the generation of free-hand editors out of a metamodel-based specification. Syntax analysis then can be mapped to the solution of a constraint satisfaction problem. It would be interesting to see if the approaches of Hessellund and Sen could be used to get similar diagram completion for DiaMeta.

Dear readers, please continue to comment on my posts or give feedback by mail. I appreciate this very much. If your own project is related somehow to visual languages, do not hesitate and send me a short summary. I gladly post and/or discuss it here on this blog.


Further reading:

• Anders Hessellund, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Andrzej Wasowski: Guided Development with Multiple Domain-Specific Languages. In Proc. of MODELS'07, 2007


• Sagar Sen, Benoit Baudry, and Hans Vangheluwe: Domain-specific model editors with model completion. In Multi-paradigm Modelling Workshop at MoDELS'07, 2007.


• Mark Minas: Syntax analysis for diagram editors: A constraint satisfaction problem. In Proc. of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'2006), 2006.