ODE: A Highly Customizable Graphical Object Design Editor

This article describes the basic concepts of an extensible customizable knowledge-basedgraphical editor and its adoption to the DOCASE methodology and tool environment. Oneaspect in this field is the mapping of conceptual models (expressed in a specific language)to their graphical representations. This also has impacts to the semantic of the user actionsin a graphical editor tool. The ability to extend and customize the editor can be used tobuild specific graphical interfaces to various kinds of tools in the software developmentprocess. Major aspects of ODE are semantics-directed editing besides normal syntax-directed editing, support of abstraction mechanisms, multiple modeless views to attack com-plexity, semantic analization and animation. The result is an highly customizable graphicaleditor construction set that matches requirements of applications in many domains of systemdesign