Bricks and Dots with Chris Horn
Workshop 10: WSEF
Window on the World
Issue 3
Workshop 10: Exchange Formats
By Susan Elliott Sim, Rainer Koschke, Ric Holt
Researchers in computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools and computer-aided reverse engineering (CARE) tools have recognized a standard exchange format as a means for improving the state of the art. This workshop was held as part of an on-going effort to develop one. The reasons for having a standard exchange format are evident in the reasons that the participants gave for attending the workshop: 1) they wanted to be able to make complementary tools work together more smoothly; and 2) they were tired of writing parsers/analyzers and wanted to avoid writing another one.
For the first time, this workshop brought together members from disparate communities to share experiences and work together. The workshop summarized previous work in this field and re-visited XML, XMI, UML, and CDIF. We discussed concrete schemas for high-level information, such as class diagrams or architectural information, and for low-level information, such as abstract syntax trees. We also debated the concepts and the mechanisms to specify meta schemas.
During the last two hours of the workshop, we departed from the planned presentations and discussions. For one hour, we broke into small groups, each focusing on a single topic.
We discussed high-level schemas, C++ schemas and APIs, and notation for exchanging schemas. The groups identified requirements, made prescriptions for progress, and wrote WILL-do lists. Afterwards, each group presented their results to the whole workshop. At the end of the day, virtually all participants committed to refining GXL, Graph eXchange Language, a format in-progress. GXL uses XML syntax and is used to encode attributed graphs. The groups who committed to working together further were University of Stuttgart, Bell Canada, IBM Canada Ltd., Mahindra-British Telecom, University of Waterloo, University of Koblenz, UBW, Philips Research, University of Victoria, and Nokia.
For more information, visit the workshop homepage at: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~simsuz/wosef or talk to one of the co-chairs.
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