Specifying Animated Diagram Languages

Diagrams are always used when communicating complex situations. As a special case, dynamic processes like the token game in Petri-nets are made clear using dynamic diagrams. Animation techniques have to be used in order to achieve a comprehensible visualization. The paper discusses dynamic diagram languages with animations, i.e., animated diagram languages, and how to specify them. Specifications of diagrams are based on an internal hypergraph model and their syntax on hypergraph grammars. Animation of diagrams are described as sequences of hypergraph transformations which control the animation of graphical objects and which are specified using hypergraph rewriting rules. The paper discusses several concepts for the animation of graphical objects. These concepts have been realized as an animation framework. Specification and framework are extensions of DiaGen, an existing framework and generator providing diagram editors for mainly static diagram classes.