Visual Specification and Automatic Transformation of Web Interchanging Documents

该方案提供了一种可视化的方法，用于在自动语言生成的通用框架中表示和验证以XML指定的文档结构，并将一个结构转换为另一个结构。这种可视化方法的基本理论是上下文相关的图文法形式主义。该方案证明了图文法形式化的简洁性和表现力，以及它对可视化描述和可视化XML语言自动生成的适用性。PI以前在图形语法、形式化和可视化语言生成方面的研究将得到扩展和调整，以适应可视化XML设计语言的自动生成，并使用工具帮助设计类似XML的文档及其相互之间的翻译。将开发一套工具，以促进类似可扩展标记语言的文件结构的可视化规范和目标文件的自动生成。因此，这些工具将使广大社区能够使用最新的计算机和互联网技术来存储和交换数字文件。这些工具和与之相关的概念也将成为编程语言、编译器和可视化界面课程的优秀教学和自我培训工具。

This proposal presents a visual approach to the representation and validation of document structures specified in XML and transformation of one structure to another, in a general framework of automatic language generation. The underlying theory of this visual approach is a context-sensitive graph grammar formalism. The proposal demonstrates the conciseness and expressiveness of the graph grammar formalism and its suitability to visual specification and automatic generation of visual XML languages. The PI's previous research on the graph grammar formalism and visual language generation will be extended and adapted to suit automatic generation of visual XML design languages with tools that assist the design of XML-like of documents and their translations between each other. A set of tools will be developed to facilitate the visual specification of XML-like document structures and automatic generation of target documents. The tools would therefore enable a wide community to use the latest computing and Internet technology in storing and exchanging digital documents. The tools and the concepts associated with them will also make excellent teaching and self-training vehicles for the courses on programming languages, compilers, and visual interfaces.