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XCDL: an XML-oriented visual composition definition language

Published: 08 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

XML data flow has reached beyond the world of computer science and has spread to other areas such as data communication, e-commerce and instant messaging. Therefore, manipulating this data by non expert programmers is becoming imperative. On one hand, Mashups have emerged a few years ago, providing users with visual tools for web data manipulation but not necessarily XML specific. Mashups have been leaning towards functional composition but no formal languages have yet been defined. On the other hand, visual languages for XML have been emerging since the standardization of XML, and mostly relying on querying XML data for extraction or structure transformations. These languages are mainly based on existing textual XML languages, have limited expressiveness and do not provide non expert programmers with means to manipulate XML data. In this paper, we define a generic visual language called XCDL based on Colored Petri Nets allowing non expert programmers to compose manipulation operations. The language is adapted to XML, providing users with means to compose XML oriented operations. The language core syntax is presented here along with an implemented prototype based on it.

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Cited By

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  • (2014)VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformationJournal of Visual Languages & Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2013.11.00325:3(210-226)Online publication date: Jun-2014
  • (2013)A visual programming language for XML manipulationJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2012.11.00124:2(110-135)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
  • (2011)XA2C: a framework for manipulating XML dataInternational Journal of Web Information Systems10.1108/174400811111658847:3(240-269)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2011

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cover image ACM Other conferences
iiWAS '10: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
November 2010
895 pages
ISBN:9781450304214
DOI:10.1145/1967486
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 November 2010

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Author Tags

  1. XML data manipulation
  2. colored Petri nets
  3. composition
  4. visual languages

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Cited By

View all
  • (2014)VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformationJournal of Visual Languages & Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2013.11.00325:3(210-226)Online publication date: Jun-2014
  • (2013)A visual programming language for XML manipulationJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2012.11.00124:2(110-135)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
  • (2011)XA2C: a framework for manipulating XML dataInternational Journal of Web Information Systems10.1108/174400811111658847:3(240-269)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2011

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