Tech Report CS-93-57

Expressing Constraints for Data Display Specification: A Visual Approach

Isabel F. Cruz

December 1993

Abstract:

In this paper we introduce a constraint-based language that has a visual syntax and allows the declarative specification of the display of data. Other features of the proposed language include: (1) simplicity and genericity of the basic constructs; (2) ability to specify a variety of displays (graphs, bar charts, pie charts, etc.); (3) compatibility with the object-oriented framework of the database language DOODLE. We provide the syntax and the semantics of the language, and examples of applications that demonstrate the expressiveness of our language.

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