Object-oriented visual language grammar and its parsing algorithm

Due to the deficiencies in their ability to define graphical objects, most existing visual language grammars are not easily extended to define a new language. In this paper we propose a formal specification method, the Object-Oriented Visual Language Grammar that allows the language designer to include graphical objects easily at the language specification level. It is a new formalism based on attributed multiset rewriting and the object-oriented paradigm. We also present a parsing algorithm that uses an And-Or-Waiting Graph to formulate dependencies between classes for instantiating objects. Finally, we investigate the theoretical complexity of our parsing algorithm.