Un ambiente de meta-modelado y visualización basado en el paradigma de Zoomable User Interfaces

Abstract

Model visualization is an important problem in software engineering, to assist designers to understand and evolve models. Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUI), which uses zoom as the main mechanism to navigate between different levels of abstraction, has the potential to improve model visualization. This paper, the first step in this research direction, presents a prototype meta-case tool, called ZooMEnv, to define and utilize concrete syntaxes (notations) of visual modeling languages. The focus of the tool is to rely on a small meta-model to represent notation in a generic way and incorporate, as a novel concept, ZUI capabilities through composition hierarchies and semantic zooming. Five different notations are developed as case studies to explore the capabilities of this tool and determine future improvements.