User interaction in a multi-view design environment

Interactive graphical editors provide good means for system design by the application of visual languages (VL). Unfortunately, applications of visual languages for the design of large systems seem not to be practicable because of the resulting huge and complicated graphical picture. The paper introduces a notion of Multi-View Design Environments (MVDEs) that try to overcome this problem. The principles of an MVDE can be applied to any VL that can be mapped to a graph like internal representation. The so called graph model is a basis for the data processing in an MVDE. It enables the applying of the Multi-View-Technique to large designs by their redundant decomposition. An MVDE allows the creation of views on the fly while keeping consistency among all views. Sophisticated user interaction techniques including direct manipulation and hypertext navigation support, makes the MVDE easy to learn and to use. The paper finishes with a short description of the implementation of two projects which have used the MVDE approach and a comparison to related work.