A bidirectional-transformation-based framework for software visualization and visual editing

Software visualization and visual editing are important and practical techniques to improve the development of complex software systems. A challenge when applying the two technologies is how to realize the correspondence, a bidirectional relationship, between the data and its visual representation correctly. Although many tools and frameworks have been developed to support the construction of visual tools, it is still complicated and error-prone to realize the bidirectional relationship. In this paper, we propose a model-driven and bidirectional-transformation-based framework for data visualization and visual editing. Our approach mainly focuses on 1) how to define and manage graphical symbols in the model form and 2) how to specify and implement the bidirectional relationship based on the technique of bidirectional model transformation. Then, a prototype tool and four case studies are presented to evaluate the feasibility of our work.