A Toolbox for Automating Visual

Abstract Visual diagrammatic (VD) notations have always been widely used in software engineering. Such notations have been used to syntactically represent the structure of software systems, but they usually lack dynamic semantics, and thus provide limited support to software engineers. In contrast, formal models would provide rigorous semantics, but the scarce adaptability to different appli-cation domains precluded their large industrial application. Most attempts tried to formalize widely used VD notations by proposing a mapping to a formal model, but they all failed in addressing flexibility, that is, the key factor of the success of VD notations. This paper presents MetaEnv, a toolbox for automating visual software engi-neering. MetaEnv augments VD notations with customizable dynamic semantics. Traditional meta-CASE tools support flexibility at syntactic level; MetaEnv aug-ments them with semantic flexibility. MetaEnv refers to a framework based on graph grammars and has been experimented as add-on to several commercial and proprietary tools that support syntactic manipulation of VD notations.