An OO visual language definition approach supporting multiple views

The formal approach to visual language definition is to use graph grammars and/or graph transformation techniques. These techniques focus on specifying the syntax and manipulation rules of the concrete representation. The paper presents a constraint and object oriented approach to defining visual languages that uses UML and OCL as a definition language. Visual language definitions specify a mapping between concrete and abstract models of possible visual sentences, which can subsequently be used to determine if instances of each model "validly" express each other. This technique supports many:many mappings between concrete and abstract model instances, and supports the implementation of functionality that requires feedback from the abstract domain to the concrete.