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Generating Reusable Visual Notations using Model Transformation

Published: 05 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Visual notations are a key aspect of visual languages. They provide a direct mapping between the intended information and set of graphical symbols. Visual notations are most often implemented using the low level syntax of programming languages which is time consuming, error prone, difficult to maintain and hardly human-centric. In this paper we describe an alternative approach to generating visual notations using by-example model transformations. In our new approach, a semantic mapping between model and view is implemented using model transformations. The notations resulting from this approach can be reused by mapping varieties of input data to their model and can be composed into different visualisations. Our approach is implemented in the CONVErT framework and has been applied to many visualisation examples. Two case studies for visualising statistical charts and visualisation of traffic data are presented in this paper. A detailed user study of our approach for reusing notations and generating visualisations has been provided that shows good reusability and general acceptance of the novel approach.

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  • (2015)Specifying model transformations by direct manipulation using concrete visual notations and interactive recommendationsJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2015.02.00528:C(195-211)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2015

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cover image ACM Other conferences
VINCI '14: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction
August 2014
262 pages
ISBN:9781450327657
DOI:10.1145/2636240
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 05 August 2014

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VINCI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 62 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 193 submissions, 37%

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  • (2015)Specifying model transformations by direct manipulation using concrete visual notations and interactive recommendationsJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2015.02.00528:C(195-211)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2015

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