Visualizing Adora Models

Most current object modeling methods and tools have weaknesses both in the concepts of hierarchical composition and in the visualization of these hierarchies. Some methods do not support hierarchical composition at all. Those methods which do, employ tools that provide explosive zoom as the only means for the visualization of hierarchies. In this paper we present an approach for the visualization of hierarchical object models that is based on the notion of fisheye views. This concept can display local detail and global context of a view in the same diagram, thus allowing a user to easily navigate in hierarchical structures without offending the principle of abstraction. We introduce the ideas behind the concept, illustrate the zooming mechanism and sketch the algorithm for the implementation of this kind of zooming. The work presented here is part of an effort to create a new method called Adora 4 for object modeling that provides strong support for hierarchical composition/decomposition.