Approaches to supporting software visual notation exchange

A wide range of software tools provide software engineers with different views (static and dynamic) of software systems. Much recent work has focused on software information model exchange. However, most software tools lack support for exchange of information about visualisation notations (both definitions of notations and instances of them). Some basic converters have been developed to support the exchange of notation information between software tools but almost all are custom-built to support specific notations and difficult to maintain. We describe the development of several notation exchange converters for tools supporting software architecture notations. This leads to a unified converter generator framework for notation exchange.