Stresa, Italy
September 5-7, 2001

Symposium on Visual Languages and Formal Methods

News

VLFM'03 will take place at Auckland, New Zealand, October 28-31, 2003 as a sub-symposium of HCC'03.

Chair

Mark Minas <minas@acm.org>
Andy Schürr <schuerr@informatik.unibw-muenchen.de>

Focus of the Symposium

The number of visual languages and environments in many applied and theoretical areas of computer science as well as other fields is growing rapidly. Moreover they are a subject of permanent change as for instance the history of UML diagrams makes clear. However, techniques for specifying, designing, and implementing such languages are still immature. Formal methods are inevitable for this task and, therefore, gain increasing importance in the context of visual languages. On the other hand, there are many formal modelling and specification approaches, where visual representations and visual languages are promising in making these approaches more comprehensible and usable.

The symposium on Visual Languages and Formal Methods aims to bring together members of these different areas and to provide a forum for presenting and discussing new results, ideas, and experience among them.
 

Topics

1. Formal specification of visual languages and environments
  • Grammar- or meta-modelling-based syntax definition techniques for VLs 
  • Static and dynamic semantics of visual languages 
  • Grammar-based image generation and recognition techniques 
  • Frameworks and meta CASE tools for processing VL and UI specifications 

2. Formal modelling and specification languages with visual representations

  • Formal and semi-formal visual modeling languages 
  • Visualization of specification languages and methods 
  • Diagrammatic reasoning and visual specification languages 

3. Visual language theory

  • Formal design criteria for visual languages 
  • Classification of visual languages and representations
  • Expressiveness of visual specification formalisms 

Call for Papers

Electronic versions of the call for papers are available in Postscript and PDF format.

Program Committee

M. Minas (Co-Chair), Germany
A. Schürr (Co-Chair), Germany
P. Bottoni, Italy
S.K. Chang, USA
G. Costagliola, Italy
 F. Drewes, Sweden
M. Gogolla, Germany
C. Gurr, UK
S. Kent, UK
K. Marriott, Australia
 S. Mauw, NL
B. Meyer, Australia
B. Vander Zanden, USA
M. Wirsing, Germany
K. Wittenburg, USA

Submission

Original research papers should make clear what new contribution the work makes, and how the work differs from related work. In addition to research papers (max. 8 pages), poster papers (2 pages) are solicited. All papers should be in IEEE 2-column conference publication format (for details see the HCC'01 call for papers). Accepted papers will appear in proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Submissions should be sent until March 25, 2001 via email (encouraged) to minas@acm.org or as 5 paper copies (discouraged) to 

     M. Minas
     Informatik 2
     Univ. Erlangen
     Martensstr. 3
     91058 Erlangen
     Germany.

Electronic submissions should be in Postscript or PDF format.

Program

 The program is available as part of the HCC'01 program.

Best Paper Award
NEW

 Na'aman Kam, Irun R. Cohen, and David Harel (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) have won the VLFM'01 Best Paper Award with their paper titled "The Immune System as a Reactive System: Modeling T Cell Activation With Statecharts". This award has come with a prize which has been donated by Nokia, a new Nokia Communicator 9210 for each of the coauthors.

Important Dates

March 25, 2001  Submission Deadline
May 20, 2001  Statechart Modeling "Contest" Deadline (see below)
June 3, 2001  Notification of Acceptance
June 25, 2001  Camera Ready Version. Author guidelines are available at the HCC'01 web site

Special Event

In order to foster a lively discussion on formal methods and allow to compare different approaches directly, everybody is invited to apply their favorite approach to specify any reasonable variant of the family of STATECHART languages with a main emphasis on syntax and static semantics and to submit their solution as a 2 page PostScript or PDF file to minas@acm.org before May 20, 2001. In particular, running systems which are built from such a specification are solicited. There will be a special session at VLFM'01 for presenting and discussing submitted solutions as well as these systems. The submitted papers will be published online and on paper at the conference site.

For details, please check the Statechart Modeling Contest web page.

Back to HCC '01 Home page