Just model! — Putting automatic synthesis of node-link-diagrams into practice

Node-link-diagrams can effectively communicate information, but their creation and maintenance require a lot of manual effort. Therefore we follow the transient views approach that aims at automatically deriving high quality diagrams from arbitrary models. Besides composing diagram structures, this task involves the arrangement of the diagram elements on the canvas, and, on a finer-grained level of detail, the arrangement of the shapes (rectangles, circles, lines, etc.) that form the diagram elements. We show the feasibility of this approach by means of the Kieler Lightweight Diagrams (KLighD) framework that creates diagrams this way. We discuss our overall design objectives in terms of this framework, investigate an alternative way to shape diagram figures, and briefly demonstrate the usage of KLighD in custom modeling environments by means of a case study.