Abstract
Formalisms for visual language specification have been investigated for more than two decades now. However, there has been little attempt to develop a systematic and comprehensive hierarchy of visual languages based on formal properties. Given the importance of the Chomsky hierarchy in the theory of textual languages and the difficulty of comparing the different visual language formalisms, it is clear that there is a need for such a hierarchy. We develop a hierarchy for VLs and investigate the expressiveness and the cost of parsing for classes defined therein. Although the hierarchy is based on the constraint multiset grammar formalism, we sketch how other visual language specification formalisms can be mapped into constraint multiset grammars. One consequence of our work is that a large class of 'naturally occurring' visual languages are inherently context-sensitive, so that the core of such a hierarchy has to be built around different forms of context-sensitivity.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages |
Publisher | IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
Pages | 196-203 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Publication status | Published - 1996 |
Event | IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages 1996 - Boulder, United States of America Duration: 3 Sept 1996 → 6 Sept 1996 Conference number: 12th https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/3922/proceeding (Proceedings) |
Conference
Conference | IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages 1996 |
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Abbreviated title | VL 1996 |
Country/Territory | United States of America |
City | Boulder |
Period | 3/09/96 → 6/09/96 |
Other | A previous title of "IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing (VL/HCC)" |
Internet address |
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