Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at Dallas 		Visual Computing Laboratory

Visual Specification and Automatic Transformation of Web Interchanging Documents


Award number: ITR 0218738
PI: Kang Zhang


Project Summary


This project investigates a visual approach to the specification and transformation of XML-based Web documents. Based on a graph grammar and graph transformation formalism, the visual approach will allow the structural requirements of any XML dialect to be specified graphically and automatically generate a graphical toolkit for the construction of Web documents of represented in the XML dialect. It will also support automatic translation of Web documents from one XML dialect to another. With the proposed spatial extension, the grammar formalism will be able to specify adaptive layout for any Web presentation.


Background


Transformations of XML documents XSL must be created manually on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, writing an effective XSL code requires some degree of programming skills and good understanding of XML’s working principle. The scientific communities have realized the importance of the XML technology and the need for automatic transformations [1]. Of the general textual approaches to the automatic translation of XML documents, Xtra [5] aims at automatic transformations between XML documents by discovering a sequence of transformation operations from the source and target DTD trees. The operations are used to generate an XSL script, which can then be applied to source XML documents to transform them to XML documents conforming to the target DTD. Approaches based on database schemas [3, 4] use rules to match similar document components for most common cases, and allow the user to customize the rules for more complex cases. These approaches offer neither automatic structure validation, nor means for visual representation and specification.

Visual approaches such as Xing [2] have been proposed. Xing achieves XML transformation and restructuring using some rules that combine the patterns of queries and results returned by queries. It uses nested boxes to represent XML data such what each element tag is written on top of a box while all the attributes of the element are enclosed in the box. Such representation is essentially textual, supplemented by hierarchical boxes surrounding the text. For a large document, the levels of nesting could be overwhelming so that it is hard for the user to understand the overall structure.


Goals, Objectives and Targeted Activities


This project has the following objectives:

  • To identify and find practical solutions the fundamental issues in visual transformation and validation of Web documents.
  • To develop a visual XML document design, validation and translation framework to support the automatic generation of Web document construction and transformation tools. The generation framework will be equipped with graphical tools for specifying the document syntax and transformation rules.
  • To extend the existing graph transformation formalism with spatial specification capability so that not only the logical structure but also the layout of XML documents could be specified graphically.
  • To evaluate the usability of the visual features of the developed toolset and enhance the user-friendliness and user productivity is using the prototypical toolset.


Project Impact


The proposed project will enhance the accessibility of IT in general and Web documents in particular to the general public by developing the user-friendly visual tools for Web document design and transformation. Web designers will find it easy to define Web document structures through graph grammar specifications and use the toolset to automatically generate graphical languages, each within a graph editor for a domain-specific XML, and if desired, for its translation into the XML of another domain. Application users in the domain without any knowledge of XML could then use the graph editor to construct domain-specific XML documents in an intuitive manner.

Teaching and training of Web engineering and programming language generation will benefit from our prototyping toolset. Using the toolset, we could step-by-step and intuitively illustrate how a visual XML language is generated in the same fashion as for conventional language generation, according to a given set of specifications. Then how an XML document can be rapidly constructed, parsed, validated, and transformed into another document style using the generated visual XML language can also be vividly demonstrated. The toolset and the concepts associated with it will make excellent teaching and self-training materials for the courses on programming languages, compilers, and visual interfaces.

Publications


  • K. Zhang, J. Kong, M.K. Qiu, and G.L. Song, Multimedia Layout Adaptation Through Grammatical Specifications, ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems, 2004, Vol.10, No.3. (in press)
  • G.L. Song, K. Zhang, R.K. Wong, and J. Kong, Management of Web Data Models Based on Graph Transformation, regular paper to appear in 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Beijing, China, 20-24 September 2004, IEEE CS Press.
  • G.L. Song, K. Zhang, and J. Kong, Model Management Through Graph Transformations, full paper to appear in 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Rome, Italy, 26-29 September 2004, IEEE CS Press.
  • G.L. Song and K. Zhang, Visual XML Schemas Based on Reserved Graph Grammars, Proc. International Conference on Information Technology (ITCC’04), Las Vegas, USA, 5-7 April 2004, IEEE CS Press, 687- 691.
  • M.K. Qiu, G.L Song, J. Kong, and K. Zhang, Spatial Graph Grammars for Web Information Transformation, Proc. 2003 IEEE Symposium on Visual/Multimedia Languages (VL’03), Auckland, New Zealand, 28-31 October 2003, IEEE CS Press, 84-91.
  • J. Kong, M.K. Qiu, and K. Zhang, Authoring Multimedia Documents Through Grammatical Specifications, Proc. 2003 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME’03), Baltimore, USA, 6-9 July, 2003, IEEE CS Press, 629-632.
  • J. Kong and K. Zhang, Toward A Graphical Approach to Multimedia Document Design, Proc. 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops - 5th International Workshop on Multimedia Network Systems and Applications, Providence, USA, 19-22 May 2003, IEEE CS Press, 666-671.
  • J. Kong, K. Zhang, M.L. Huang, Application-Oriented Spatial Graph Grammars, Proc. 21st IASTED International Conference on Applied Informatics, Innsbruck, Austria, 10-13 February 2003, CD-ROM, 0-88986-341-5, 210-215.
  • K. Zhang, J. Kong, G.L. Song, X. Zeng, and R. Zacharias, XML-Based Biological Information Specification and Transformation, submitted for publication, September 2004.


Transforming XML to SMIL Using Reserved Graph Grammar


1. Original tree structure of the XML file 2. Result tree structure of the SMIL file

Cited References


  1. K-H. Cheung, Y. Liu, A. Kumar, M. Snyder, M. Gerstein, and P. Miller, An XML Application for Genomic Data Interoperation, Proc. 2rd IEEE Symp. on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, 4-6 Nov. 2001, 97-103.
  2. M. Erwig, A Visual Language for XML, Proc. 2000 IEEE Symp. on Visual Languages, Seattle, USA, 10-13 Sep. 2000, IEEE CS Press, 47-54.
  3. L. Milo and S. Zohar, Using Schema Matching to Simplify Heterogeneous Data Translation, Proc. 24th Int. Conf. on Very Large Databases, New York City, USA, 24-27 August, 1998, 122-133.
  4. W.M. Shui and R.K. Wong, Application of XML Schema and Active Rules System in Management and Integration of Heterogeneous Biological Data, Proc. 3rd IEEE Symp. on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, 10-12 March 2003, 367-374.
  5. H. Su, H. Kuno, and E.A. Rundensteiner, Automating the Transformation of XML Documents, Proc. 3rd Int. Workshop on Web Information and Data Management, Atlanta, USA, 9 Nov. 2001, ACM Press, 68-75.


Copyrights © 2007 Visual Computing Laboratory
Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, TX 75083-0688, Lab Address: ECS 3.221