Graph Technology for Structured Documents

In the context of integrated software engineering environments, graphs and transformations on them have proven to be a useful technology for describing the structure of and operations on documents in formal languages. We discuss ways of applying this graph technology to more general structured documents. Existing editing environments for general structured documents offer only basic structure-oriented editing and navigation features. Implementing high-level operations specific for a document type is still costly. Specifying such operations as graph queries or transformations is often more efficient. We present a solution to the problem of volatile graph schemas in the context of general structured documents while still offering tools specific to a document type.