Story Diagrams: A new Graph Grammar Language based on the Unified Modelling Language and Java

Graph grammars and graph grammar based systems improved a lot towards practical usability during the last years. Nevertheless, there are still major problems to overcome in order to attract a broad number of software designers and developers to the usage of graph grammars. Two of the main problems are, (1) that current graph grammar notations are too proprietary and (2) that there exists no seamless integration of graph grammars and common (OO) design and implementation languages like UML and C++ or Java. Story Diagrams are a new graph grammar language that tries to overcome these deficiencies. Story Diagrams adopt main features from Progres, e.g. formal semantics, explicit graph schemes, programmed graph rewriting with parameterized rules, negative, optional and set-valued rule elements. Story diagrams extend the Progres graph model by offering direct support for ordered, sorted, and qualified associations and aggregations as known from the object-oriented data model. Story Diagrams adopt UML class diagrams for the specification of graph schemes, UML activity diagrams for the (graphical) representation of control structures, and UML collaboration diagrams as notation for graph rewriting rules. Story Diagrams are translated to Java classes and methods allowing a seamless integration of object-oriented and graph grammar specified system parts. This code does NOT rely on an additional huge library like the GRAS database.